The Future Is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin

SONYA DORMAN When I Was Miss Dow

THESE hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others plain as paper. They come first as explorers, and perhaps realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous beings of proteide; and we, even baby I, are Protean, also, being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain lobe, we live in more or less glass bridges over the humanoid chasm, eating, recreating, attending races and playing other games like most living creatures.

Eventually, we’re all dumped into the cell banks and reproduced once more.

After the explorers comes the colony of miners and scientists. The warden and some of the other elders put on faces to greet them, agreeing to help with the mining of some ores, even giving them a koota or two as they become interested in our racing dogs. They set up their places of life, pop up their machines, bang-bang, chug-chug; we put on our faces, forms, smiles and costumes; I am old enough to learn to change my shape, too.

The Warden says to me, “It’s about time you made a change, yourself. Some of your friends are already working for these people, bringing home credits and sulfas.”

My Uncle (by the Warden’s fourth conjunction) made himself over at the start, being one of the first to realize how it could profit us.

I protest to the Warden, “I’m educated and trained as a scholar. You always say I must remain deep in my mathematics and other studies.”

My Uncle says, “You have to do it. There’s only one way for us to get along with them,” and he runs his fingers through his long blond hair. My Uncle’s not an educated person, but highly placed, politically, and while Captain Dow is around my Uncle retains this particular shape. The Captain is shipping out soon, then Uncle will find some other features, because he’s already warned that it’s unseemly for him to be chasing around in the face of a girl after the half-bearded boys from the space ships. I don’t want to do this myself, wasting so much time, when the fourteen decimals even now are clicking on my mirrors.

The Warden says, “We have a pattern from a female botanist, she ought to do for you. But before we put you into the pattern tank, you’ll have to approximate another brain lobe. They have two.”

“I know,” I say, sulkily. A botanist. A she!

“Into the tank,” the Warden says to me without mercy, and I am his to use as he believes proper.

I spend four days in the tank absorbing the female Terran pattern. When I’m released, the Warden tells me, “Your job is waiting for you. We went to a lot of trouble to arrange it.” He sounds brusque, but perhaps this is because he hasn’t conjoined for a long time. The responsibilities of being Warden of Mines and Seeds come first, long before any social engagement.

I run my fingers through my brunette curls, and notice my Uncle is looking critically at me. “Haven’t you made yourself rather old?” he asks.

“Oh, he’s all right,” the Warden says. “Thirty-three isn’t badly matched to the Doctor, as I understand it.”

Dr. Arnold Proctor, the colony’s head biologist, is busy making radiograph pictures (with his primitive X-rays) of skeletal structures: murger birds, rodents, and our pets and racers, the kootas—dogs to the Terrans, who are fascinated by them. We breed them primarily for speed and stamina, but some of them carry a gene for an inherited structural defect which cripples them and they have to be destroyed before they are full grown. The Doctor is making a special study of kootas.

He gets up from his chair when I enter his office. “I’m Miss Dow, your new assistant,” I say, hoping my long fingernails will stand up to the pressure of punch keys on the computer, since I haven’t had much practise in retaining foreign shapes. I’m still in uncertain balance between myself and Martha Dow, who is also myself. But one does not have two lobes for nothing, I discover.

“Good morning. I’m glad you’re here,” the Doctor says.

He is a nice, pink man, with silver hair, soft-spoken, intelligent. I’m pleased, as we work along, to find he doesn’t joke and wisecrack like so many of the Terrans, though I am sometimes whimsical. I like music and banquets as well as my studies.

Though absorbed in his work, Dr. Proctor isn’t rude to interrupters. A man of unusual balance, coming as he does from a culture which sends out scientific parties that are ninety per cent of one sex, when their species provides them with two. At first meetings he is dedicated but agreeable, and I’m charmed.

“Dr. Proctor,” I ask him one morning. “Is it possible for you to radiograph my koota? She’s very fine, from the fastest stock available, and I’d like to breed her.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he promises with his quick, often absent, smile. “By all means. You wish to breed only the best.” It’s typical of him to assume we’re all as dedicated as he.

My Uncle’s not pleased. “There’s nothing wrong with your koota,” he says. “What do you want to X-ray her for? Suppose he finds something is wrong? You’ll be afraid to race or breed her, and she won’t be replaced. Besides, your interest in her may make him suspicious.”

“Suspicious of what?” I ask, but my Uncle won’t say, so I ask him, “Suppose she’s bred and her pups are cripples?”

The Warden says, “You’re supposed to have your mind on your work, not on racing. The koota was just to amuse you when you were younger.”

I lean down and stroke her head, which is beautiful, and she breathes a deep and gentle breath in response.

“Oh, let him go,” my Uncle says wearily. He’s getting disgusted because they didn’t intend for me to bury myself in a laboratory or a computer room, without making more important contacts. But a scholar is born with a certain temperament, and has an introspective nature, and as I’m destined to eventually replace the Warden, naturally I prefer the life of the mind.

“I must say,” my Uncle remarks, “you look the image of a Terran female. Is the work interesting?”

“Oh, yes, fascinating,” I reply, and he snorts at my lie, since we both know it’s dull and routine, and most of the time is spent working out the connections between my two brain lobes, which still present me with some difficulty.

My koota bitch is subjected to a pelvic radiograph. Afterwards, I stand on my heels in the small, darkened cubicle, looking at the film on the viewing screen. There he stands, too, with his cheekbones emerald in the peculiar light, and his hair, which is silver in daylight, looks phosphorescent. I resist this. I am resisting this Doctor with the X-ray eyes who can examine my marrow with ease. He sees Martha’s marrow, every perfect corpuscle of it.

You can’t imagine how comforting it is to be so transparent. There’s no need to pretend, adjust, advance, retreat or discuss the oddities of my planet. We are looking at the X-ray film of my prized racer and companion to determine the soundness of her hip joints, yet I suspect the Doctor, platinum-green and tall as a tower, is piercing my reality with his educated gaze. He can see the blood flushing my surfaces. I don’t need to do a thing but stand up straight so the crease of fat at my waist won’t distort my belly button, the center of it all.

“You see?” he says.

I do see, looking at the film in the darkness where perfection or disaster may be viewed, and I’m twined in the paradox which confronts me here. The darker the room, the brighter the screen and the clearer the picture. Less light! and the truth becomes more evident. Either the koota is properly jointed and may be bred without danger of passing the gene on to her young, or she is not properly jointed, and cannot be used. Less light, more truth! And the Doctor is green sculpture—a little darker and he would be a bronze—but his natural color is pink alabaster.

“You see,” the Doctor says, and I do try to see. He points his wax pencil at one hip joint on the film, and says, “A certain amount of osteo-arthritic buildup is already evident. The cranial rim is wearing down, she may go lame. She’ll certainly pass the defect on to some of her pups, if she’s bred.”

This koota has been my playmate and friend for a long time. She retains a single form, that of koota, full of love and beautiful speed; she has been a source of pleasure and pride.

Dr. Proctor, of the pewter hair, will discuss the anatomical defects of the koota in a gentle and cultivated voice. I am disturbed. There shouldn’t be any need to explain the truth, which is evident. Yet it seems that to comprehend the exposures, I require a special education. It’s said that the more you have seen, the quicker you are to sort the eternal verities into one pile and the dismal illusions into another. How is it that sometimes the Doctor wears a head which resembles that of a koota, with a splendid muzzle and noble brow?

Suddenly he gives a little laugh and points the end of the wax pencil at my navel, announcing: “There. There, it is essential that the belly button be attached onto the pelvis, or you’ll bear no children.” Thoughts of offspring had occurred to me. But weren’t we discussing my racer? The radiograph film is still clipped to the view screen, and upon it, spread-eagled, appears the bony Rorschach of my koota bitch, her hip joints expressing doom.

I wish the Doctor would put on the daylight. I come to the conclusion that there’s a limit to how much truth I can examine, and the more I submit to the conditions necessary for examining it, the more unhappy I become.

Dr. Proctor is a man of such perfect integrity that he continues to talk about bones and muscles until I’m ready to scream for mercy. He has done something that is unusual and probably prohibited, but he’s not aware of it. I mean it must be prohibited in his culture, where it seems they play on each other, but not with each other. I am uneasy, fluctuating.

He snaps two switches. Out goes the film and on goes the sun, making my eyes stream with sensitive and grateful tears, although he’s so adjusted to these contrasts he doesn’t so much as blink. Floating in the sunshine I’ve become opaque. He can’t see anything but my surface tensions, and I wonder what he does in his spare time. A part of me seems to tilt, or slide.

“There, there, oh dear, Miss Dow,” he says, patting my back, rubbing my shoulder blades. His forearms and fingers extend gingerly. “You do want to breed only the best, don’t you?” he asks. I begin within me a compulsive ritual of counting the elements; it’s all I can do to keep communications open between my brain lobes. I’m suffering from eclipses: one goes dark, the other lights up, that one goes dark, the other goes nova.

“There, there,” the Doctor says, distressed because I’m quivering and trying to keep the connections open; I have never felt clogged before. They may have to put me back into the pattern tank.

Profoundly disturbed, I lift my face, and he gives me a kiss. Then I’m all right, balanced again, one lobe composing a concerto for virtix flute, the other one projecting, “Oh Arnie, oh Arnie.” Yes, I’m okay for the shape I’m in. He’s marking my joints with his wax pencil (the marks of which can be easily erased from the film surface) and he’s mumbling, “It’s essential, oh yes, it’s essential.”

Finally he says, “I guess all of us colonists are lonely here,” and I say, “Oh yes, aren’t we,” before I realize the enormity of the Warden’s manipulations, and what a lot I have to learn. Evidently the Warden triple-carded me through the Colony Punch Center as a Terran. I lie and say, “Oh, yes. Yes, yes. Oh, Arnie, put out the light,” for we may find some more truth.

“Not here,” Arnie says, and of course he’s right. This is a room for study, for cataloguing obvious facts, not a place for carnival. There are not many places for it, I discover with surprise. Having lived in glass all my life I expect everyone else to be as comfortable there as I am but this isn’t so.

Just the same we find his quarters, after dark, to be comfortable and free of embarrassment. You wouldn’t think a dedicated man of his age would be so vigorous, but I find out he spends his weekends at the recreation center hitting a ball with his hand. The ball bounces back off a wall and he hits it and hits it. Though he’s given that up now because we’re together on weekends.

“You’re more than an old bachelor like me deserves,” he tells me.

“Why are you an old bachelor?” I ask him. I do wonder why, if it’s something not to be.

He tries to explain it to me. “I’m not a young man. I wouldn’t make a good husband, I’m afraid. I like to work late, to be undisturbed. In my leisure time, I like to make wood carvings. Sometimes I go to bed with the sun and sometimes I’m up working all night. And then children. No. I’m lucky to be an old bachelor,” he says.

Arnie carves kaku wood, which has a brilliant grain and is soft enough to permit easy carving. He’s working on a figure of a murger bird, whittling lengthwise down the wood so the grain, wavy, full of flowing, wedge-shaped lines, will represent the feathers. The lamp light shines on his hair and the crinkle of his eyelids as he looks down and carves, whittles, turns. He’s absorbed in what he doesn’t see there but he’s projecting what he wants to see. It’s the reverse of what he must do in the viewing room. I begin to suffer a peculiar pain, located in the nerve cluster between my lungs. He’s not talking to me. He’s not caressing me. He’s forgotten I’m here, and like a false projection, I’m beginning to fade. In another hour perhaps the film will become blank. If he doesn’t see me, then am I here?

He’s doing just what I do when absorbed in one of my own projects, and I admire the intensity with which he works: it’s magnificent. Yes, I’m jealous of it. I burn with rage and jealousy. He has abandoned me to be Martha and I wish I were myself again, free in shape and single in mind. Not this sack of mud clinging to another. Yet he’s teaching me that it’s good to cling to another. I’m exhausted from strange disciplines. Perhaps he’s tired, too; I see that sometimes he kneads the muscles of his stomach with his hands, and closes his eyes.

The Warden sits me down on one of my rare evenings home, and talks angrily. “You’re making a mistake,” he says. “If the Doctor finds out what you are, you’ll lose your job with the colony. Besides, we never supposed you’d have a liaison with only one man. You were supposed to start with the Doctor, and go on from there. We need every credit you can bring in. And by the way, you haven’t done well on that score lately. Is he stingy?”

“Of course he isn’t.”

“But all you bring home in credits is your pay.”

I can think of no reply. It’s true the Warden has a right to use me in whatever capacity would serve us all best, as I will use others when I’m a Warden, but he and my Uncle spend half the credits from my job on sulfadiazole, to which they’ve become addicted.

“You’ve no sense of responsibility,” the Warden says. Perhaps he’s coming close to time for conjunction again, and this makes him more concerned about my stability.

My Uncle says, “Oh, he’s young, leave him alone. As long as he turns over most of those pay credits to us. Though what he uses the remainder for, I’ll never know.”

I use it for clothes at the Colony Exchange. Sometimes Arnie takes me out for an evening, usually to the Laugh Tree Bar, where the space crews, too, like to relax. The bar is the place to find joy babies; young, pretty, planet-born girls who work at the Colony Punch Center during the day, and spend their evenings here competing for the attention of the officers. Sitting here with Arnie, I can’t distinguish a colonist’s daughter from one of my friends or relatives. They wouldn’t know me, either.

Once, at home, I try to talk with a few of these friends about my feelings. But I discover that whatever female patterns they’ve borrowed are superficial ones; none of them bother to grow an extra lobe, but merely tuck the Terran pattern into a corner of their own for handy reference. They are most of them on sulfas. Hard and shiny toys, they skip like pebbles over the surface of the colonists’ lives.

Then they go home, revert to their own free forms, and enjoy their mathematics, colors, compositions, and seedings.

“Why me?” I demand of the Warden. “Why two lobes? Why me?”

“We felt you’d be more efficient,” he answers. “And while you’re here, which you seldom are these days, you’d better revert to other shapes. Your particles may be damaged if you hold that woman form too long.”

Oh, but you don’t know, I want to tell him. You don’t know I’ll hold it forever. If I’m damaged or dead, you’ll put me into the cell banks, and you’ll be amazed, astonished, terrified, to discover that I come out complete, all Martha. I can’t be changed.

“You little lump of protagon,” my Uncle mumbles bitterly. “You’ll never amount to anything, you’ll never be a Warden. Have you done any of your own work recently?”

I say, “Yes, I’ve done some crystal divisions, and re-grown them in non-established patterns.” My Uncle is in a bad mood, as he’s kicking sulfa and his nerve tissue is addled. I’m wise to speak quietly to him, but he still grumbles.

“I can’t understand why you like being a two-lobed pack of giggles. I couldn’t wait to get out of it. And you were so dead against it to begin with.”

“Well, I have learned,” I start to say, but can’t explain what it is I’m still learning, and close my eyes. Part of it is that on the line between the darkness and the brightness it’s easiest to float. I’ve never wanted to practise only easy things. My balance is damaged. I never had to balance. It’s not a term or concept that I understand even now, at home, in free form. Some impress of Martha’s pattern lies on my own brain cells. I suspect it’s permanent damage, which gives me joy. That’s what I mean about not understanding it. I am taught to strive for perfection. How can I be pleased with this, which may be a catastrophe?

Arnie carves on a breadth of kaku wood, bringing out to the surface a seascape. Knots become clots of spray, a flaw becomes wind-blown spume. I want to be Martha. I’d like to go to the Laugh Tree with Arnie, for a good time, I’d like to learn to play cards with him.

You see what happens: Arnie is, in his way, like my original self, and I hate that part of him, since I’ve given it up to be Martha. Martha makes him happy, she is chocolate to his appetite, pillow for his weariness.

I turn for company to my koota. She’s the color of morning, her chest juts out like an axe blade, her ribs spring up and back like wings, her eyes are large and clear as she returns my gaze. Yet she’s beyond hope; in a little time, she’ll be lame; she cannot race any more, she must not mother a litter. I turn to her and she gazes back into my eyes, dreaming of speed and wind on the sandy beaches where she has run.

“Why don’t you read some tapes?” Arnie suggests to me, because I’m restless and I disturb him. The koota lies at my feet. I read tapes. Every evening in his quarters Arnie carves, I read tapes, the broken racer lies at my feet. I pass through Terran history this way. When the clown tumbles into the tub, I laugh. Terran history is full of clowns and tubs; at first it seems that’s all there is, but you learn to see beneath the comic costumes.

While I float on the taut line, the horizon between light and dark, where it’s so easy, I begin to sense what is under the costumes: staggering down the street dead drunk on a sunny afternoon with everyone laughing at you; hiding under the veranda because you made blood come out of Pa’s face; kicking a man when he’s in the gutter because you’ve been kicked and have to pass it on. Tragedy is what one of the Terrans called being a poet in the body of a cockroach.

“Have you heard the rumor?” Arnie asks, putting down the whittling tool. “Have you heard that some of the personnel in Punch Center aren’t really humans?”

“Not really?” I ask, putting away the tape. We have no tragedy. In my species, family relationships are based only on related gene patterns; they are finally dumped into the family bank and a new relative is created from the old. It’s one form of ancient history multiplying itself, but it isn’t tragic. The koota, her utility destroyed by a recessive gene, lies sleeping at my feet. Is this tragedy? But she is a single form, she can’t regenerate a lost limb, or exfoliate brain tissue. She can only return my gaze with her steadfast and affectionate one.

“What are they, then?” I ask Arnie. “If they’re not human?”

“The story is that the local life forms aren’t as we really see them. They’ve put on faces, like ours, to deal with us. And some of them have filtered into personnel.”

Filtered! As if I were a virus.

“But they must be harmless,” I say. “No harm has come to anyone.”

“We don’t know that for a fact,” Arnie replies.

“You look tired,” I say, and he comes to me, to be soothed, to be loved in his flesh, his single form, his search for the truth in the darkness of the viewing cubicle. At present he’s doing studies of murger birds. Their spinal cavities are large, air-filled ovals, and their bone is extremely porous, which permits them to soar to great heights.

The koota no longer races on the wind-blown beaches; she lies at our feet, looking into the distance. The wall must be transparent to her eyes, I feel that beyond it she sees clearly how the racers go, down the long, bright curve of sand in the morning sun. She sighs, and lays her head down on her narrow, delicate paws. I look into the distance too: bright beaches and Arnie, carrying me from his ship. But he will not carry me again.

Arnie says, “I seem to be tired all the time.” He puts his head on my breast. “I don’t think the food’s agreeing with me, lately.”

“Do you suffer pains?” I ask him, curiously.

“Suffer,” he mutters. “What kind of nonsense is that, with analgesics. No I don’t suffer. I just don’t feel well.”

He’s absorbed in murger birds, kaku wood, he descends into the bottom of the darks and rises up like a rocket across the horizon into the thin clarity above, while I float. I no longer dare to breathe, I’m afraid of disturbing everything. I do not want anything. His head lies gently on my breast and I will not disturb him.

“Oh. My God,” Arnie says, and I know what it’s come to, even before he begins to choke, and his muscles leap although I hold him in my arms. I know his heart is choking on massive doses of blood; the brilliance fades from his eyes and they begin to go dark while I tightly hold him. If he doesn’t see me as he dies, will I be here?

I can feel, under my fingers, how rapidly his skin cools. I must put him down, here with his carvings and his papers, and I must go home. But I lift Arnie in my arms, and call the koota, who gets up rather stiffly. It’s long after dark, and I carry him slowly, carefully, home to what he called a crystal palace, where the Warden and my Uncle are teaching each other to play chess with a set some space captain gave them in exchange for seed crystals. They sit in a bloom of light, sparkling, their old brains bent over the chessmen, as I breathe open the door and carry Arnie in.

First, my Uncle gives me just a glance, but then another glance, and a hard stare. “Is that the Doctor?” he asks.

I put Arnie down and hold one of his cold hands. “Warden,” I say, on my knees, on eye level with the chessboard and its carved men. “Warden, can you put him in one of the banks?”

The Warden turns to look at me, as hard as my Uncle. “You’ve become deranged, trying to maintain two lobes,” he says. “You cannot reconstitute or recreate a Terran by our methods, and you must know it.”

“Over the edge, over the edge,” my Uncle says, now a blond, six-foot, hearty male Terran, often at the Laugh Tree with one of the joy babies. He enjoys life, his own or someone else’s. I have, too, I suppose. Am I fading? I am, really, just one of Arnie’s projections, a form on a screen in his mind. I am not, really, Martha. Though I tried.

“We can’t have him here,” the Warden says. “You better get him out of here. You couldn’t explain a corpse like that to the colonists, if they come looking for him. They’ll think we did something to him. It’s nearly time for my next conjunction, do you want your nephew to arrive in disgrace? The Uncles will drain his bank.”

The Warden gets up and comes over to me. He takes hold of my dark curls and pulls me to my feet. It hurts my physical me, which is Martha. God knows Arnie, I’m Martha, it seems to me. “Take him back to his quarters,” the Warden says to me. “And come back here immediately. I’ll try to see you back to your own pattern, but it may be too late. In part, I blame myself. If you must know. So I will try.”

Yes, yes, I want to say to him; as I was, dedicated, free; turn me back into myself, I never wanted to be anyone else, and now I don’t know if I am anyone at all. The light’s gone from his eyes and he doesn’t see me, or see anything, does he?

I pick him up and breathe the door out, and go back through the night to his quarters, where the lamp still burns. I’m going to leave him here, where he belongs. Before I go, I pick up the small carving of the murger bird, and take it with me, home to my glass bridge where at the edge of the mirrors the decimals are still clicking perfectly, clicking out known facts; an octagon can be reduced, the planet turns at such a degree on its axis, to see the truth you must have light of some sort, but to see the light you must have darkness of some sort. I can no longer float on the horizon between the two because that horizon has disappeared. I’ve learned to descend, and to rise, and descend again.

I’m able to revert without help to my own free form, to re-absorb the extra brain tissue. The sun comes up and it’s bright. The night comes down and it’s dark. I’m becoming somber, and a brilliant student. Even my Uncle says I’ll be a good Warden when the time comes.

The Warden goes to conjunction; from the cell banks a nephew is lifted out. The koota lies dreaming of races she has run in the wind. It is our life, and it goes on, like the life of other creatures.