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 Cite 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 god-child. 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.”
“You mean you were doing it.”
“One gets into the habit of working.”
“But you didn’t have to!”
“It was a private project. Most interesting things are.”
She whispered in his ear.
With happily flushed faces, they went into Old Al’s inner garden and locked the door.
Jannina, temporary family representative, threw the computer helmet over her head and, thus plugged in, she cleaned house, checked food supplies, did a little of the legal business entailed by a family of eighteen adults (two triplet marriages, a quad, and a group of eight). She felt very smug. She put herself through by radio to Himalayan *HQ (above two thousand meters) and hooking computer to computer—a very odd feeling, like an urge to sneeze that never comes off—extended a formal invitation to one Leslie Smith (“Come stay, why don’t you?”), notifying every free Komarov to hop it back and fast. Six hikers might come for the night—back-packers. More food. First thunderstorm of the year in Albany, New York (North America). Need an extra two rooms by Thursday. Hear the Palnatoki are moving. Can’t use a room. Can’t use a kitten. Need the geraniums back, Mrs. Adam, Chile. The best maker of hand-blown glass in the world has killed in a duel the second-best maker of hand-blown glass for joining the movement toward ceramics. A bitter struggle is foreseen in the global economy. Need a lighting designer. Need fifteen singers and electric pansensicon. Standby tax labor xxxxxpj through xxxyq to Cambaluc, great tectogenic—
With the guilty feeling that one always gets gossiping with a computer, for it’s really not reciprocal, Jannina flipped off the helmet. She went to get Ilse. Climbing back through the white foam room, the purple foam room, the green foam room, everything littered with plots and projects of the clever Komarovs or the even cleverer Komarov children, stopping at the baby room for Ilse to nurse her baby. Jannina danced staidly around studious Ilse. They turned on the nursery robot and the television screen. Ilse drank beer in the swimming room, for her milk. She worried her way through the day’s record of events—faults in the foundation, some people who came from Chichester and couldn’t find C.E. so one of them burst into tears, a new experiment in genetics coming round the gossip circuit, an execrable set of equations from some imposter in Bucharest.
“A duel!” said Jannina.
They both agreed it was shocking. And what fun. A new fashion. You had to be a little mad to do it. Awful.
The light went on over the door to the tunnel that linked the house to the antechamber, and very quickly, one after another, as if the branch line had just come free, eight Komarovs came into the room. The light flashed again; one could see three people debouch one after the other, persons in boots, with coats, packs, and face masks over their woollies. They were covered with snow, either from the mountain terraces above the house or from some other place, Jannina didn’t know. They stamped the snow off in the antechamber and hung their clothes outside; “Good heavens, you’re not circumcised!” cried someone. There was as much handshaking and embracing all around as at a wedding party. Velet Komarov (the short, dark one) recognized Fung Pao-yu and swung her off her feet. People began to joke, tentatively stroking one another’s arms. “Did you have a good hike? Are you a good hiker, Pao-yu?” said Velet. The light over the antechamber went on again, though nobody could see a thing since the glass was steamed over from the collision of hot with cold air. Old Al stopped, halfway into the kitchen. The baggage receipt chimed, recognized only by family ears—upstairs a bundle of somebody’s things, ornaments, probably, for the missing Komarovs were still young and the young are interested in clothing, were appearing in the baggage receptacle. “Ann or Phuong?” said Jannina; “five to three, anybody? Match me!” but someone strange opened the door of the booth and peered out. Oh, a dizzying sensation. She was painted in a few places, which was awfully odd because really it was old-fashioned; and why do it for a family evening? It was a stocky young woman. It was an awful mistake (thought Jannina). Then the visitor made her second mistake. She said:
“I’m Leslie Smith.” But it was more through clumsiness than being rude. Chi Komarov (the tall, blond one) saw this instantly, and snatching off his old-fashioned spectacles, he ran to her side and patted her, saying teasingly:
“Now, haven’t we met? Now, aren’t you married to someone I know?”
“No, no,” said Leslie Smith, flushing with pleasure.
He touched her neck. “Ah, you’re a tightrope dancer!”
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Leslie Smith.
“I’m a tightrope dancer,” said Chi. “Would you believe it?”
“But you’re too—too spiritual,” said Leslie Smith hesitantly.
“Spiritual, how do you like that, family, spiritual?” he cried, delighted (a little more delighted, thought Jannina, than the situation really called for) and he began to stroke her neck.
“What a lovely neck you have,” he said.
This steadied Leslie Smith. She said, “I like tall men,” and allowed herself to look at the rest of the family. “Who are these people?” she said, though one was afraid she might really mean it.
Fung Pao-yu to the rescue: “Who are these people? Who are they, indeed! I doubt if they are anybody. One might say, ‘I have met these people,*’ but has one? What existential meaning would such a statement convey? I myself, now, I have met them. I have been introduced to them. But they are like
the Sahara; it is all wrapped in mystery; I doubt if they even have names,” etc. etc. Then lanky Chi Komarov disputed possession of Leslie Smith with Fung Pao-yu, and Fung Pao-yu grabbed one arm and Chi the other; and she jumped up and down fiercely; so that by the time the lights dimmed and the food came, people were feeling better—or so Jannina judged. So embarrassing and delightful to be eating fifteen to a room! “We Komarovs are famous for eating whatever we can get whenever we can get it,” said Velet proudly. Various Komarovs in various places, with the three hikers on cushions and Ilse at full length on the rug. Jannina pushed a button with her toe and the fairy lights came on all over the ceiling. “The children did that,” said Old Al. He had somehow settled at Leslie Smith’s side and was feeding her so-chi from his own bowl. She smiled up at him. “We once,” said a hiking companion of Fung Pao-yu’s, “arranged a dinner in an amphitheater where half of us played servants to the other half, with forfeits for those who didn’t show. It was the result of a bet. Like the bad old days. Did you know there were once five billion people in this world?”
“The gulls,” said Ilse, “are mating on the Isle of Skye.” There were murmurs of appreciative interest. Chi began to develop an erection and everyone laughed. Old Al wanted music and Velet didn’t; what might have been a quarrel was ended by Ilse’s furiously boxing their ears. She stalked off to the nursery.
“Leslie Smith and I are both old-fashioned,” said Old Al, “because neither of us believes in gabbing. Chi—your theater?”
“We’re turning people away.” He leaned forward, earnestly, tapping his fingers on his crossed knees. “I swear, some of them are threatening to commit suicide.”
“It’s a choice,” said Velet reasonably.
Leslie Smith had dropped her bowl. They retrieved it for her.
“Aiy, I remember—” said Pao-yu. “What I remember! We’ve been eating dried mush for three days, tax-issue. Did you know one of my dads killed himself?”
“No!” said Velet, surprised.
“Years ago,” said Pao-yu. “He said he refused to live to see the time when chairs were reintroduced. He also wanted further genetic engineering, I believe, for even more intelligence. He did it out of spite, I’m sure. I think he wrestled a shark. Jannina, is this tax-issue food? Is it this year’s style tax-issue sauce?”
“No, next year’s,” said Jannina snappishly. Really, some people! She slipped into Finnish, to show up Pao-yu’s pronunciation. “Isn’t that so?” she asked Leslie Smith.
Leslie Smith stared at her.
More charitably Jannina informed them all, in Finnish, that the Komarovs had withdrawn their membership in a food group, except for Ann, who had taken out an individual, because what the dickens, who had the time? And tax-issue won’t kill you. As they finished, they dropped their dishes into the garbage field and Velet stripped a layer off the rug. In that went, too. Indulgently Old Al began a round:
“Red.”
“Sun,” said Pao-yu.
“The Red Sun Is,” said one of the triplet Komarovs.
“The Red Sun Is—High,” said Chi.
“The Red Sun Is High, The,” Velet said.
“The Red Sun Is High, The Blue—” Jannina finished. They had come to Leslie Smith, who could either complete it or keep it going. She chose to declare for complete, not shyly (as before) but simply by pointing to Old Al.
“The red sun is high, the blue,” he said. “Subtle! Another: Ching.”
“Nü.”
“Ching nü ch’i.”
“Ching nü ch‘i ch’u.”
“Ssu.”
“Wo.”
“Ssu wo yü.” It had got back to Leslie Smith again. She said, “I can’t do that.” Jannina got up and began to dance—I’m nice in my nasty way, she thought. The others wandered toward the pool and Ilse reappeared on the nursery monitor screen, saying, “I’m coming down.” Somebody said, “What time is it in the Argentine?”
“Five A.M.”
“I think I want to go.”
“Go then.”
“I go.”
“Go well.”
The red light over the antechamber door flashed and went out.
“Say, why’d you leave your other family?” said Ilse, settling near Old Al where the wall curved out. Ann, for whom it was evening, would be home soon; Chi, who had just got up a few hours back in western America, would stay somewhat longer; nobody ever knew Old Al’s schedule and Jannina herself had lost track of the time. She would stay up until she felt sleepy. She followed a rough twenty-eight-hour day, Phuong (what a nuisance that must be at rehearsals!) a twenty-two-hour one, Ilse six hours up, six hours dozing. Jannina nodded, heard the question, and shook herself awake.
“I didn’t leave them. They left me.”
There was a murmur of sympathy around the pool.
“They left me because I was stupid,” said Leslie Smith. Her hands were clasped passively in her lap. She looked very genteel in her blue body paint, a stocky young woman with small breasts. One of the triplet Komarovs, flirting in the pool with the other two, choked. The non-aquatic members of the family crowded around Leslie Smith, touching her with little, soft touches; they kissed her and exposed to her all their unguarded surfaces, their bellies, their soft skins. Old Al kissed her hands. She sat there, oddly unmoved. “But I am stupid,” she said. “You’ll find out.” Jannina put her hands over her ears: “A masochist!” Leslie Smith looked at Jannina with a curious, stolid look. Then she looked down and absently began to rub one blue-painted knee. “Luggage!” shouted Chi, clapping his hands together, and the triplets dashed
for the stairs. “No, I’m going to bed,” said Leslie Smith; “I’m tired,” and quite simply, she got up and let Old Al lead her through the pink room, the blue room, the turtle-and-pet room (temporarily empty), the trash room, and all the other rooms, to the guest room with the view that looked out over the cold hillside to the terraced plantings below.
“The best maker of hand-blown glass in the world,” said Chi, “has killed in a duel the second-best maker of hand-blown glass in the world.”
“For joining the movement to ceramics,” said Ilse, awed. Jannina felt a thrill: this was the bitter stuff under the surface of life, the fury that boiled up. A bitter struggle is foreseen in the global economy. Good old tax-issue stuff goes toddling along, year after year. She was, thought Jannina, extraordinarily grateful to be living now, to be in such an extraordinary world, to have so long to go before her death. So much to do!
Old Al came back into the living room. “She’s in bed.”
“Well, which of us—?” said the triplet-who-had-choked, looking mischievously round from one to the other. Chi was about to volunteer, out of his usual conscientiousness, thought Jannina, but then she found herself suddenly standing up, and then just as suddenly sitting down again. “I just don’t have the nerve,” she said. Velet Komarov walked on his hands toward the stairs, then somersaulted, and vanished, climbing. Old Al got off the hand-carved chest he had been sitting on and fetched a can of ale from it. He levered off the top and drank. Then he said, “She really is stupid, you know.” Jannina’s skin crawled.
“Oooh,” said Pao-yu. Chi betook himself to the kitchen and returned with a paper folder. It was coated with frost. He shook it, then impatiently dropped it in the pool. The redheaded triplet swam over and took it. “Smith, Leslie,” he said. “Adam Two, Leslie. Yee, Leslie. Schwarzen, Leslie.”
“What on earth does the woman do with herself besides get married?” exclaimed Pao-yu.
“She drove a hovercraft,” said Chi, “in some out-of-the-way places around the Pacific until the last underground stations were completed. Says when she was a child she wanted to drive a truck.”
“Well, you can,” said the redheaded triplet, “can’t you? Go to Arizona or the Rockies and drive on the roads. The sixty-mile-an-hour road. The thirty-mile-an-hour road. Great artistic recreation.”
“That’s not work,” said Old Al.
“Couldn’t she take care of children?” said the redheaded triplet. Ilse sniffed.
“Stupidity’s not much of a recommendation for that,” Chi said. “Let’s see—no children. No, of course not. Overfulfilled her tax work on quite a few routine matters here. Kim, Leslie. Went to Moscow and contracted a double with some fellow, didn’t last. Registered as a singleton, but that didn’t last, either. She said she was lonely and they were exploiting her.”
Old Al nodded.
“Came back and lived informally with a theater group. Left them. Went into psychotherapy. Volunteered for several experimental, intelligenceenhancing programs, was turned down—hm!—sixty-five come the winter solstice, muscular coordination average, muscular development above average,
no overt mental pathology, empathy average, prognosis: poor. No, wait a minute, it says, ‘More of the same.’ Well, that’s the same thing.”
“What I want to know,” added Chi, raising his head, “is who met Miss Smith and decided we needed the lady in this Ice Palace of ours?”
Nobody answered. Jannina was about to say, “Ann, perhaps?” but as she felt the urge to do so—surely it wasn’t right to turn somebody off like that, just for that!—Chi (who had been flipping through the dossier) came to the last page, with the tax-issue stamp absolutely unmistakable, woven right into the paper.
“The computer did,” said Pao-yu and she giggled idiotically.
“Well,” said Jannina, jumping to her feet, “tear it up, my dear, or give it to me and I’ll tear it up for you. I think Miss Leslie Smith deserves from us the same as we’d give to anybody else, and I—for one—intend to go right up there—”
“After Velet,” said Old Al dryly.
“With Velet, if I must,” said Jannina, raising her eyebrows, “and if you don’t know what’s due a guest, Old Daddy, I do, and I intend to provide it. Lucky I’m keeping house this month, or you’d probably feed the poor woman nothing but seaweed.”
“You won’t like her, Jannina,” said Old Al.
“I’ll find that out for myself,” said Jannina with some asperity, “and I’d advise you to do the same. Let her garden with you, Daddy. Let her squirt the foam for the new rooms. And now”—she glared round at them—“I’m going to clean this room, so you’d better hop it, the lot of you,” and dashing into the kitchen, she had the computer helmet on her head and the hoses going before they had even quite cleared the area of the pool. Then she took the helmet off and hung it on the wall. She flipped the cover off her wrist chronometer and satisfied herself as to the date. By the time she got back to the living room there was nobody there, only Leslie Smith’s dossier lying on the carved chest. There was Leslie Smith; there was all of Leslie Smith. Jannina knocked on the wall cupboard and it revolved, presenting its openable side; she took out chewing gum. She started chewing and read about Leslie Smith.
Q: What have you seen in the last twenty years that you particularly liked?
A: I don’t … the museum, I guess. At Oslo. I mean the … the mermaid and the children’s museum, I don’t care if it’s a children’s museum.
Q: Do you like children?
A: Oh no.
(No disgrace in that, certainly, thought Jannina.)
Q: But you liked the children’s museum.
A: Yes, sir … . Yes … . I liked those little animals, the fake ones, in the—the—
Q: The crèche?
A: Yes. And I liked the old things from the past, the murals with the flowers on them, they looked so real.
(Dear God!)
Q: You said you were associated with a theater group in Tokyo. Did you like it?
A: No … yes. I don’t know.
Q: Were they nice people?
A: Oh yes. They were awfully nice. But they got mad at me, I suppose … . You see … well, I don’t seem to get things quite right, I suppose. It’s not so much the work, because I do that all right, but the other … the little things. It’s always like that.
Q: What do you think is the matter?
A: You … I think you know.
Jannina flipped through the rest of it: normal, normal, normal. Miss Smith was as normal as could be. Miss Smith was stupid. Not even very stupid. It was too damned bad. They’d probably have enough of Leslie Smith in a week, the Komarovs; yes, we’ll have enough of her (Jannina thought), never able to catch a joke or a tone of voice, always clumsy, however willing, but never happy, never at ease. You can get a job for her, but what else can you get for her? Jannina glanced down at the dossier, already bored.
Q: You say you would have liked to live in the old days. Why is that? Do you think it would have been more adventurous or would you like to have had lots of children?
A: I … you have no right … You’re condescending.
Q: I’m sorry. I suppose you mean to say that then you would have been of above-average intelligence. You would, you know.
A: I know. I looked it up. Don’t condescend to me.
Well, it was too damned bad! Jannina felt tears rise in her eyes. What had the poor woman done? It was just an accident, that was the horror of it, not even a tragedy, as if everyone’s forehead had been stamped with the word “Choose” except for Leslie Smith’s. She needs money, thought Jannina, thinking of the bad old days when people did things for money. Nobody could take to Leslie Smith. She wasn’t insane enough to stand for being hurt or exploited. She wasn’t clever enough to interest anybody. She certainly wasn’t feeble-minded; they couldn’t very well put her into a hospital for the feeble-minded or the brain-injured; in fact (Jannina was looking at the dossier again), they had tried to get her to work there and she had taken a good, fast swing at the supervisor. She had said the people there were “hideous” and “revolting.” She had no particular mechanical aptitudes. She had no particular interests. There was not even anything for her to read or watch; how could there be? She seemed (back at the dossier) to spend most of her time either working or going on public tours of exotic places, coral reefs and places like that. She enjoyed aqualung diving, but didn’t do it often because that got boring. And that was that. There was, all in all, very little one could do for Leslie Smith. You might even say that in her own person she represented all the defects of the bad old days. Just imagine a world made up of such creatures! Jannina yawned. She slung the folder away and padded into the kitchen. Pity Miss Smith wasn’t good-looking, also a pity that she was too well balanced (the folder said) to think that cosmetic surgery would make that much difference. Good for you, Leslie, you’ve got some sense; anyhow.
Jannina, half asleep, met Ann in the kitchen, beautiful, slender Ann reclining on a cushion with her so-chi and melon. Dear old Ann. Jannina nuzzled her brown shoulder. Ann poked her.
“Look,” said Ann, and she pulled from the purse she wore at her waist a tiny fragment of cloth, stained rusty brown.
“What’s that?”
“The second-best maker of hand-blown glass—oh, you know about it—well, this is his blood. When the best maker of hand-blown glass in the world had stabbed to the heart the second-best maker of hand-blown glass in the world, and cut his throat, too, some small children steeped handkerchiefs in his blood and they’re sending pieces all over the world.”
“Good God!” cried Jannina.
“Don’t worry, my dear,” said lovely Ann; “it happens every decade or so. The children say they want to bring back cruelty, dirt, disease, glory, and hell. Then they forget about it. Every teacher knows that.” She sounded amused. “I’m afraid I lost my temper today, though, and walloped your god-child. It’s in the family, after all.”
Jannina remembered when she herself had been much younger and Annie, barely a girl, had come to live with them. Ann had played at being a child and had put her head on Jannina’s shoulder, saying, “Jannie, tell me a story.” So Jannina now laid her head on Ann’s breast and said, “Annie, tell me a story.”
Ann said: “I told my children a story today, a creation myth. Every creation myth has to explain how death and suffering came into the world, so that’s what this one is about. In the beginning, the first man and the first woman lived very contentedly on an island until one day they began to feel hungry. So they called to the turtle who holds up the world to send them something to eat. The turtle sent them a mango and they ate it and were satisfied, but the next day they were hungry again.
“‘Turtle,’ they said, ‘send us something to eat.’ So the turtle sent them a coffee berry. They thought it was pretty small, but they ate it anyway and were satisfied. The third day they called on the turtle again and this time the turtle sent them two things: a banana and a stone. The man and woman did not know which to choose, so they asked the turtle which thing it was they should eat. ‘Choose,’ said the turtle. So they chose the banana and ate that, but they used the stone for a game of catch. Then the turtle said, ‘You should have chosen the stone. If you had chosen the stone, you would have lived forever, but now that you have chosen the banana, Death and Pain have entered the world, and it is not I who can stop them.’”
Jannina was crying. Lying in the arms of her old friend, she wept bitterly, with a burning sensation in her chest and the taste of death and ashes in her mouth. It was awful. It was horrible. She remembered the embryo shark she had seen when she was three, in the Auckland Cetacean Research Center, and how she had cried then. She didn’t know what she was crying about. “Don’t, don’t!” she sobbed.
“Don’t what?” said Ann affectionately. “Silly Jannina!”
“Don’t, don’t,” cried Jannina, “don’t, it’s true, it’s true!” and she went on
in this way for several more minutes. Death had entered the world. Nobody could stop it. It was ghastly. She did not mind for herself but for others, for her godchild, for instance. He was going to die. He was going to suffer. Nothing could help him. Duel, suicide, or old age, it was all the same. “This life!” gasped Jannina. “This awful life!” The thought of death became entwined somehow with Leslie Smith, in bed upstairs, and Jannina began to cry afresh, but eventually the thought of Leslie Smith calmed her. It brought her back to herself. She wiped her eyes with her hand. She sat up. “Do you want a smoke?” said beautiful Ann, but Jannina shook her head. She began to laugh. Really, the whole thing was quite ridiculous.
“There’s this Leslie Smith,” she said, dry-eyed. “We’ll have to find a tactful way to get rid of her. It’s idiotic, in this day and age.”
And she told lovely Annie all about it.