Dangerous Visions (64 page)

"Much better," Tod said, looking about at the bare but comfortable room. "How does the war go with you, civilian?"

"Hard," the man said, no longer jolly. "But we do our best, serving the fighting men as we can. But relax, soldier; food and drink will be here soon. It won't be anything special; our ersatz supply is low. There's a new chemical beef we've been saving, you can have that. I believe it's made of wood bark, but it's not at all bad on the tongue."

"Do you have a cigarette?" Tod said.

He proffered a brown cylinder. "Ersatz, too, I'm afraid; treated wool fibers. But it burns, anyway."

Tod lit it. The acrid smoke seared his throat and lungs; he coughed, and put it out.

"I'm sorry," the station manager said sadly. "It's the best we have. Everything, everything is ersatz; our cigarettes, our food, our drink . . .the war goes hard with us all."

Tod sighed and leaned back. When the woman came out of the doorway, bearing a tray, he sat up and his eyes were first for the food. He didn't even notice how lovely she was, how her ragged, near-transparent gown hugged her rounded breasts and hips. When she bent towards him, handing him a steaming bowl of strange-smelling broth, her blonde hair tumbled forward and brushed his cheek. He looked up and caught her eyes; they dropped shyly.

"You'll feel better after this," she said huskily, and made a movement with her body that dulled his appetite for food, created a different kind of hunger. It was four years since he had seen a woman like this. The war had taken them first, with bombs and radio-active dust, all the young women who remained behind while the men escaped to the comparative safety of battle. He dipped into the broth and found it vile, but he downed every drop. The wood-based beef was tough and chewy, but it was better than the canned rations he had grown accustomed to. The bread tasted of seaweed, but he slathered it with an oily rancid oleo and chewed great mouthfuls.

"I'm tired," he said at last. "I'd like to sleep."

"Yes, of course," the Peace Station manager said. "This way, soldier, come this way."

He followed him into a small windowless room, its only furniture a rusty metal cot. The sergeant dropped across its canvas mattress wearily, and the station manager closed the door quietly behind him. But Tod knew he wouldn't sleep, despite his sated stomach. His mind was too full, and his blood was streaming too fast through his veins, and the ache for the woman was strong in his body.

Then the door opened and she came in.

She said nothing. She came to the bed and sat beside him. She leaned over and kissed his mouth. "My name is Eleanora," she whispered, and he seized her roughly. "No, wait," she said, wriggling coyly out of his grasp. She got off the cot and went to the corner of the room.

He watched her slither out of her clothing. The blonde hair slipped as she pulled the dress over her head, and the curls hung at a crazy angle over her brow. She giggled, and put the wig back into position. Then she reached behind her and unhooked the brassiere; it dropped to the floor, revealing the flat slope of the hairy chest. She was about to remove the rest of her undergarments when the sergeant started to scream and run for the door; she reached out and held his arm and crooned words of love and pleading. He struck the creature with all the strength in his fist, and it fell to the floor, weeping bitterly, its skirt hoisted high on the muscular, hairy legs. The sergeant didn't pause to retrieve his armor or his weapons; he went out of the Peace Station into the smoky wasteland, where death awaited the unarmed and despairing.

Afterword:

"Ersatz" is a rejected story. It was returned to me by an editor who simply said, "Don't like future-war stuff." He isn't the only one with the attitude. Several editors feel that future wars don't really constitute a "dangerous vision," and prefer their authors to steer clear of the subject. Atomic conflicts are "trite." Postatomic holocausts are "cliché." Armageddon is "overdone." In the world of fiction, at least, there is some opinion that our case of atomic jitters has been cured, and that readers would rather do without reminders of ruin and radiation. But the playing field of science fiction is the future, and the future has to be extrapolated from the ingredients of the present. And if you don't think that those ingredients of doom are still with us, your radio needs tubes, your prescription needs changing, and you have wax in your ears. Personally, I hope our authors, particularly the science fiction writers who have special privileges and talents, continue to barrage the world with fresh words on the subject, to make us continually afraid of what might be, and continually concerned with prevention and cure. To me, the most dangerous vision of all is the one that's rose-colored, and I'm grateful that the editor of this volume has spectacles of clear glass.

To know Sonya Dorman is to love her, if you'll pardon the mickey-mouse on my part. Also, it might bug her husband Jerry, who has very powerful forearms, and with whom Sonya Dorman raises and shows Akitas (a kind of Japanese baby pony of a dog that looks as if it should want to tear out your jugular but generally only wants to slobber drool all over you in slaphappy friendliness) at their Parnassus Kennels in Stony Point, New York, which has got to be the most strictured syntax since Victor Hugo did a twenty-two-page sentence in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, which is the shape this sentence is in.

She writes, in reply to a request for autobiographical goodies: "My auto. story is so preposterous I hardly know what to tell you. I did not have a classical education. I went to private schools (progressive) in New England, with the result that I have very little education but am just crummy with culture. I grew up around horses but can't afford them now, which is why I raise and show Akitas—the perceptive dog for sensitive people—in between writing poems and stories. Have been a cook, receptionist, riding instructor, flamenco dancer and married. I like speculative fiction because I believe art and science should be lovers, not enemies or adversaries."

None of the foregoing, of course, will prepare you for the genuine horror and immediacy of the story kindly little Sonya has written. A story that can only be compared, and then only remotely, with the work of the late Shirley Jackson. It also says nothing about the substantial reputation she has acquired in the last few years as a contributor to magazines as various as
Cavalier, Galaxy, Redbook
, Damon Knight's excellent
Orbit 1
anthology of originals,
The Saturday Evening Whateveritis
and
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
.

You can read Leigh Brackett or Vin Packer or C. L. Moore and think jeezus, the muscularity of the writing, and when you find out they are women, you say, jeezus, they write like men, with strength. Or you can read Zenna Henderson and think, jeezus, she writes just like a woman, all pastels. Or you can read Ayn Rand and think jeezus!

But that's another line of criticism.

But when you read Sonya Dorman you don't think of the muscularity of male writing. You read it as written by a woman, but there is no pretense. There is no attempt to emulate the particular strengths of male writing. It is purely female reasoning and attack, but it is
strong
. A special kind of tensile strength. It is what is meant by something turned out by a potent woman. It is a kind of writing
only
a woman can do. Carol Emshwiller, who is elsewhere in this book, has something like this strength, but most perfectly germinated is S. Dorman's development. It deals with reality in the unflinching way women
will
deal with it, when they are no longer shucking themselves or those watching. And I submit it is all the more teeth-clenching for the relentless truth it proffers.

This is a memorable story, and provides merely one more facet of the talent that writes under the drab by-line S. Dorman. It's a by-line you might watch for.

 
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality
.

T. S. Eliot
 

Seizing the shriek in her stained teeth, she ran away, in spite of the voices crying after her from every crevice and glittering façade. Faces at the broken windows became a collage of grins as she ran, still holding the shriek between her teeth, determined not to let it escape. Her heels ached from pounding down the concrete highways, leaping over cracks and gaps in what used to be the most traveled road in the country.

"Oh no, no," she sobbed as she ran.

Bindweed grasped her ankles and she tore it loose with frantic fingers and ran on.

Choices appeared at the roadside, the entrances to burrows, underground shanties. Once some thing flew down and landed near her, beckoning, but she shut her teeth on the writhing shriek and looked straight ahead, down the length of the cracked roadbed, with its overgrown promenades at each side. She would continue on the obvious path, for fear of being lost beyond help.

"Here, chickie, here, chickie," called an old woman, beckoning, grinning, offering her a hidey-hole, perhaps at the expense of her hide, for she was still young, and succulent.

"No, no, no," she panted as she ran. For she was only thirty, and was unique, and to be eaten was all right, for people must exist, but to die was terrible. Plain and simple, she did not want to die. Not now, running for her life, and not ever, when her inevitable time came, but she was immediately concerned with now, and later on would have to take care of itself. Even as she ran, she began to tremble for later on, as if now weren't severe enough.

Think of it, she conversed in great gasps with herself, leaping over a crevasse where a southbound lane had split off from the main runway. Think of it, she insisted, scarcely having breath left but unable to control her mind, which was galloping faster than her weary legs.

I'm only thirty, I'm unique, there's no one in this world, this universe, who is me, with my memories:

SNAPSHOT #1

It had snowed. She stood in the sagging doorway, bundled up for winter in her fur leggings, and waited for Marn. They would hunt some animal for the stewpot. She saw things in negative, according to the moonlight: white trees, dark snow pockets. A feather seemed to breathe near her.

"Hey, come on," Marn said, taking her by the shoulder, and they drifted like two dark flakes onto the powdered grass, toward the woods. "We'll smoke it," Marn said confidently, and the water ran into her mouth. The smokehouse was hot and dark, a womb out of which the good things were trundled for distribution. It was her good luck to be headman's woman. Her children were less cold and hungry. Still, she had a greasy feeling, somewhere, when she heard the cries of other children. Marn said it was because she was young.

Her furs had lateral stripes like those of a tiger. She was a headman's daughter, and wife of a headman. She was tall, educated, privileged, and at length on the sleeping skins she would burn like fat in Marn's fire.

"Come on, rest a wee," a young girl called to her, but she put on a burst of speed, for the girl's teeth were shining like daggers, and as she went, she sobbed to herself (saving her real breath for the running), No, I can't die, I'm not ready to. Oh no, no, and it was the same sound she had made that winter when:

SNAPSHOT #2

The orchards had borne no fruit and the deer were famished. Back into the mountains withdrew all animals except those that were slaughtered where open water ran. By solstice there was no open water left. The fish slept at the bottom of the lake. Smelts would not rise to the cold, blue holes cut by the fishers. The leathers cracked and split on their feet, the chimney of the smokehouse stopped breathing, most of the fires were silent.

Into this famine was born her third child, with a bad foot. Holding him up in the air, Marn said, "He is not good," and snapped his neck.

"Oh no," she cried, holding her swollen abdomen with both palms and feeling the blood run down her thighs. "No, no," she cried to the headman, her man, for nine months in the hot dark, waiting, only to come to this? We are all going to come to this?

Marn handed the dead baby to the old woman, who took him out to the smokehouse. She lay in her blood and tears, crying, for the sizzled fat on the baby. Then the eyes dried, hers, and the baby's, in the fire smoke, and she felt it was all more than could be asked of any woman.

Where the broken concrete split into a fork, one side going south, one west, she would have paused, to determine her advantage, but at the crotch of the fork two youngsters arrived with knives.

She wanted more than anything to stop and rest. There were no alternatives offered her; either she must run and run, or she must stop and be killed. She couldn't prevent her mind from balancing one against the other, even while she knew it was no choice to make.

"Catch your breath," the youngsters jeered at her, and she chose the west road without thinking. One of them hurled a chancy knife after her, which split open the skin of her shoulder. Ignoring the pale blood which poured down, she went on. I can't die now, she thought. I'm not ever going to die. I am the only I in this world. She knew there was too much of her to be lost, much which could never be anyone else, and it was all precious and irreplaceable. Why didn't they realize how important it was for her to survive? She contained:

SNAPSHOT #3

After the hard winter, the iron world split open and flowers came up. It was so astonishing. She passed the place where Marn's last bone was buried (only a headman would have his skull buried, intact, the jaws still hinged as if speaking to his community) and went down to the riverbank where the children were bathing. Her Neely stood tall this spring. In spite of food shortages over the winter, he had filled out. At least Daddyporridge had helped to nourish him, and give him this spring strength.