Orbit 2

“I should think you’d be anxious to see your red-headed friend.”

“Perhaps I am.”

Helen paused at the stairs. “You didn’t exactly sparkle tonight, did you?” she remarked. “What was the matter?”

“Tired, I guess.”

“Who was it called?”

“MacCready.”

“What did he want?”

“Oh… nothing.”

“Nothing! When he calls after midnight!”

“It was about a dimple in Draco.”

“A dimple—”

“Object’s headed toward the earth. Everything else is rushing away. Puts a dimple in the universe out in Draco.”

“Headed toward the earth! Very fast?”

Bill shrugged. “About six-tenths c — hundred thousand miles a second.”

“You mean it’s going to hit us?”

“Afraid not. You see, it’s quite a ways off.”

“How far?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” he said impatiently. “A billion light-years maybe.”

“Well, you don’t need to be so disagreeable about it. I can ask, can’t I?”

“It’s like Job asking the Voice, out of the Whirlwind how much torque He’s got.”

Helen stood without speaking for several moments, then turned and went slowly up the stairs. Bill waited until he heard her door close. Then he switched out the lights and drew the curtains away from the window.

Capella was far above the haze now, shining in the stars of Auriga with a golden-reddish glow, as bright as the glow of Edna’s hair. Suddenly Bill had the most intense sense of identity with Auriga. How lonely he must be up there among all those gods and monsters, the only one without a story. Did the old Charioteer ever ponder the meaning of his stars? If so, what were his answers? Or did he bother to ask questions anymore — when the answers had no meaning?

Joanna Russ, born in 1937, attended Cornell and the Yale Drama School, where she got a “totally useless” M.F.A. in playwriting. She was a Westinghouse STS scholar in 1954, with a project on the growth of Aspergillus janus under light of various wavelengths; she has acted in community theater (the Brooklyn Heights Players) and semi-professional groups (the West Broadway Workshop).

The notion of a prehistoric world of barbaric cruelty and splendor, a world closer than ours to the ambiguous beginnings of things, has been explored by Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and Avram Davidson, among others. . but never like this. Here, in the first two stories of a series, Joanna Russ gives us a new kind of prehistoric hero — not Howard's broad-thewed Conan, not Leiber's bearded Fafhrd, nor even Davidson's learned Virgil, but Alyx — a gray-eyed, quiet, black-haired young woman.

Many years ago, long before the world got into the state it is in today, young women were supposed to obey their husbands; but nobody knows if they did nor not. In those days they wore their hair piled foot upon foot on top of their heads. Along with such weights they would also carry water in two buckets at the ends of a long pole; this often makes you slip. One did; but she kept her mouth shut. She put the buckets down on the ground and with two sideward kicks — like two dance steps, flirt with the left foot, flirt with the right — she emptied the both of them. She watched the water settle into the ground. Then she swung the pole upon her shoulder and carried them home. She was only just seventeen. Her husband had made her do it. She swung the farm door open with her shoulder and said:

SHE: Here is your damned water.

HE: Where?

SHE: It is beneath my social class to do it and you know it.

HE: You have no social class; only I do, because I am a man.

SHE: I wouldn’t do it if you were a—

(Here follows something very unpleasant.)

HE: Woman, go back with those pails. Someone is coming tonight.

SHE: Who?

HE: That’s not your business.

SHE: Smugglers.

HE: Go!

SHE: Go to hell.

Perhaps he was somewhat afraid of his tough little wife. She watched him from the stairs or the doorway, always with unvarying hatred; that is what comes of marrying a wild hill girl without a proper education. Beatings made her sullen. She went to the water and back, dissecting him every step of the way, separating blond hair from blond hair and cracking and sorting his long limbs. She loved that. She filled the farm water barrel, rooted the maidservant out of the hay and slapped her, and went indoors with her head full of pirates. She spun, she sewed, she shelled, ground, washed, dusted, swept, built fires all that day and once, so full of her thoughts was she that she savagely wrung and broke the neck of an already dead chicken.

Near certain towns, if you walk down to the beach at night, you may see a very queer sight: lights springing up like drifting insects over the water and others answering from the land, and then something bobbing over the black waves to a blacker huddle drawn up at the very margin of the sand. They are at their revenues. The young wife watched her husband sweat in the kitchen. It made her gay to see him bargain so desperately and lose. The maid complained that one of the men had tried to do something indecent to her. Her mistress watched silently from the shadows near the big hearth and more and more of what she saw was to her liking. When the last man was gone she sent the maid to bed, and while collecting and cleaning the glasses and the plates like a proper wife, she said:

“They rooked you, didn’t they!”

“Hold your tongue,” said her husband over his shoulder. He was laboriously figuring his book of accounts with strings of circles and crosses and licking his finger to turn the page.

“The big one,” she said, “what’s his name?”

“What’s it to you?” he said sharply. She stood drying her hands in a towel and looking at him. She took off her apron, her jacket and her rings; then she pulled the pins out of her black hair. It fell below her waist and she stood for the last time in this history within a straight black cloud.

She dropped a cup from her fingers, smiling at him as it smashed. They say actions speak louder. He jumped to his feet; he cried, “What are you doing!” again and again in the silent kitchen; he shook her until her teeth rattled.

“Leaving you,” she said.

He struck her. She got up, holding her jaw. She said, “You don’t see anything. You don’t know anything.”

“Get upstairs,” he said.

“You’re an animal,” she cried, “you’re a fool,” and she twisted about as he grasped her wrist, trying to free herself. They insist, these women, on crying, on making demands, and on disagreeing about everything. They fight from one side of the room to the other. She bit his hand and he howled and brought it down on the side of her head. He called her a little whore. He stood blocking the doorway and glowered, nursing his hand. Her head was spinning. She leaned against the wall and held her head in both hands. Then she said:

“So you won’t let me go.”

He said nothing.

“You can’t keep me,” she said, and then she laughed; “no, no, you can’t,” she added, shaking her head, “you just can’t.” She looked before her and smiled absently, turning this fact over and over. Her husband was rubbing his knuckles.

“What do you think you’re up to,” he muttered.

“If you lock me up, I can’t work,” said his wife and then, with the knife she had used for the past half year to pare vegetables, this woman began to saw at her length of hair. She took the whole sheaf in one hand and hacked at it. Her husband started forward. She stood arrested with her hands involved in her hair, regarding him seriously, while without taking his eyes off her, running the tip of his tongue across his teeth, he groped behind the door— he knew there is one thing you can always do. His wife changed color. Her hands dropped with a tumbled rush of hair, she moved slowly to one side, and when he took out from behind the door the length of braided hide he used to herd cattle, when he swung it high in the air and down in a snapping arc to where she — not where she was; where she had been — this extraordinary young woman had leapt half the distance between them and wrested the stock of the whip from him a foot from his hand. He was off balance and fell; with a vicious grimace she brought the stock down short and hard on the top of his head. She had all her wits about her as she stood over him.