Joanna Russ - The Female Man

Now I know how I got to Whileaway, but how did I get stuck with Jeannine? And how did Janet get into that world and not mine? Who did that? When the question is translated into Whilewayan, Dear Reader, you will see the technicians of Whileaway step back involuntarily; you will see Boy Scout Evason blanch; you will see the Chieftainess of the Whileawayan scientific establishment, mistress of ten thousand slaves and wearer of the bronze breastplates, direct stern questions right and left, while frowning. Etcetera.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh Jeannine was saying miserably under her breath. I don’t want to be here. They forced me. I want to go home. This is a terrible place .

“Who did that?” said Miss Evason. “Not me. Not my people.”

Praise God, Whose image we put in the plaza to make the eleven-year-olds laugh. She has brought me home.

Dig in. Winter’s coming. When I—not the “I” above but the “I” down here, naturally; that’s Janet up there —

When “I” dream of Whileaway, I dream first of the farms, and although words are inadequate to this great theme, while I live I yet must tell you that the farms are the only family units on Whileaway, not because Whileawayans think farm life is good for children (they don’t) but because farm work is harder to schedule and demands more day-to-day continuity than any other kind of job. Farming on Whileaway is mainly caretaking and machine-tending; it is the emotional security of family life that provides the glamor. I do not know this from observation; I know it from knowledge; I have never visited Whileaway in my own person, and when Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna stepped out of the stainless steel sphere into which they had been transported from wherever the dickens it was that they were before (etcetera), they did so alone. I was there only as the spirit or soul of an experience is always there.

Sixty eight-foot-tall Amazons, the Whileawayan Praetorian Guard, threw daggers in all directions (North, South, East, and West).

Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna arrived in the middle of a field at the end of an old-fashioned tarmac that stretched as a feeder to the nearest hovercraft highway. No winter, few roofs. Vittoria and Janet embraced and stood very still, as Aristophanes describes. They didn’t yell or pound each other’s shoulders, or kiss, or hug, or cry out, or jump up and down, or say “You old son-of-a-gun!” or tell each other all the news, or push each other to arm’s length and screech, and then hug each other again. More farsighted than either Jeannine or Janet, I can see beyond the mountain range on the horizon, beyond the Altiplano, to the whale-herders and underground fisheries on the other side of the world; I can see desert gardens and zoological preserves; I can see storms brewing. Jeannine gulped. Must they do that in public ? There are a few fluffy summer clouds above Green Bay, each balancing on its own tail of hot air; the dust settles on either side of the highway as a hovercar roars and passes. Vittoria’s too stocky for Jeannine’s taste; she could at least be good-looking. We strolled down the feeder road to the road to the hovercraft-way, observed by nobody, all alone, except that I can see a weather satellite that sees me. Jeannine keeps just behind Vittoria, staring with censorious horror at Vittoria’s long, black hair.

“I’ll they know we’re here,” says Jeannine, the world falling about her ears, “why didn’t they send someone to meet us? I mean, other people.”

“Why should they?” says Janet.

JEANNINE : But we might lose our way.

JANET: You can’t. I’m here and I know the way.

JEANNINE: Suppose you weren’t with us. Suppose we’d killed you.

JANET: Then it would certainly be preferable that you lose your way!

JEANNINE: But suppose we held you as a hostage? Suppose you were alive but we threatened to kill you?

JANET: The longer it takes to get anywhere, the more time I have to think of what to do. I can probably stand thirst better than you can. And of course, since you have no map, I can mislead you and not tell you the truth about where to go.

JEANNINE: But we’d get there eventually, wouldn’t we?

JANET: Yes. So there’s no difference, you see.

JEANNINE: But suppose we killed you?

JANET: Either you killed me before you got here, in which case I am dead, or you kill me after you get here, in which case I am dead. It makes no difference to me where I die.

JEANNINE: But suppose we brought a—a cannon or a bomb or something—suppose we fooled you and then seized the Government and threatened to blow everything up!

JANET: For the purposes of argument, let us suppose that. First of all, there is no government here in the sense that you mean. Second, there is no one place from which to control the entire activity of Whileaway, that is, the economy. So your one bomb isn’t enough, even supposing you could kill off our welcoming committee. Introducing an entire army or an entire arsenal through the one point would take either a very advanced technology—which you have not got—or vast amounts of time. If it took you vast amounts of time, that would be no problem for us; if you came through right away, you must come through either prepared or unprepared. If you came through prepared, waiting would only assure that you spread out, used up your supplies, and acquired a false sense of confidence; if you came through unprepared and had to spend time putting things together, that would be a sign that your technology is not so advanced and you’re not that much of a threat one way or the other.

JEANNINE:(controlling herself): Hm!

JANET: You see, conflicts between states are not identical with conflicts between persons. You exaggerate this business of surprise. Relying on the advantage of a few hours is not a very stable way of proceeding, is it? A way of life so unprotected would hardly be worth keeping.

JEANNINE: I hope—I don’t hope really because it would be awful but just to pay you out I hope!—well, I hope that some enemy with fantastically advanced technology sends experts through that what-do-you-call-it and I hope they freeze everybody within fifty miles with green rays —and then I hope they make that whatever-you-call-it a permanent whatever-you-call-it so they can bring through anything they want to whenever they want to and kill you all !

JANET: Now there’s an example worth talking about. First, if they had a technology as advanced as that, they could open their own access points, and we certainly can’t watch everywhere at all times. It would make life too obsessive. But suppose they must use this single one. No welcoming committee—or defensive army, even—could withstand those fifty-mile green rays, yes? So that’s not worth sending an army against, is it? They would just be frozen or killed. However, I suspect that the use of such a fifty-mile green ray would produce all sorts of grossly observable phenomena—that is, it would be instantly obvious that something or somebody was paralyzing everything within a radius of fifty miles—and if these technologically advanced but unamiable persons were so obliging as to announce themselves in that fashion, we’d hardly need to find out about their existence by sending anyone here in the flesh, would we?.

(A long silence. Jeannine is trying to think of something desperately crushing. Her platform wedgies aren’t made for walking and her feet hurt.)

JANET: Besides, it’s never at the first contact that these things happen. I’ll show you the theory, some day.

Some day (thinks Jeannine) somebody will get yon in spite of all that rationality. All that rationality will go straight up into the air. They don’t have to invade; they can just blow you up from outer space; they can just infect you with plague, or infiltrate, or form a fifth column. They can corrupt you. There are all sorts of horrors. You think life is safe but it isn’t, it isn’t at all. It’s just horrors. Horrors!