She nodded, resting her head on his shoulder. “Yes, my husband; I’d like that very much.”
“Amanda ...” he said, surprised, wonderingly. “My wife. My wife.”
AFTERWORD-
PHOENIX IN THE ASHES
This story was described by one reviewer as “a Southern California love story with a difference.”
I often get the inspiration for a story from a song. This story was inspired by two different songs, one by Judy Collins, called “Albatross,” and the other an old folk song called “Take Me Out of Pity.” The former is a haunting love song that I’d always imagined taking place in a kind of Arthur Rackham fantasy world; but a friend of mine envisioned it as happening in New England, and there is a line in it about “a Spanish friend of the family.” The other song, also known as “The Old Maid’s Lament,” is a traditional song with a much more pragmatic outlook. Somehow the two songs and all the disparate images fused in my mind, and with further input from my first husband, Vernor, as I was trying to plot a story around them, the novelette ended up taking place in Southern California after a nuclear war. (Two potential alternate scenarios involved a woman in colonial times becoming involved with a humanoid alien stranded on Earth, or a war between populations of a double planet system. I still wonder sometimes what the story would have turned into if I’d followed either of those ideas through; they may yet mutate into something else and turn up in some future story I write.)
Originally I’d intended to call the story “Take Me Out of Pity,” which I saw as having a nice double meaning, in the context. But my editor asked me to reconsider, saying that if some critic happened to dislike the story, calling it “Take Me Out of Pity” was like “putting your head on the block and handing someone the ax.” I changed the title. (I seem to have a knack for picking arcane titles. I originally wanted to call my novel The Snow Queen “Carbuncle,” after the city in which most of the action takes place. I liked the ambience of a word that meant either “jewel” or “fester” —the city being both—but unfortunately people who only know the meaning “fester” seem to far outnumber the ones who know both meanings. I got very mixed reactions when I told people what I was calling the book ... some nods and smiles, a lot of blanching. I was finally convinced, by another editor, not to call my novel Fester. Now, quite frankly, even I can’t imagine why I ever wanted to.)
VOICES FROM THE DUST
4:30. 4:30 in the morning. 4:30 and fifteen Martian seconds…Petra Greenfeld picked up the wood-grained electric clock and shook it. Hurry up! Hurry up ... or else stop. She set it down on the desk again, too hard in the low gravity, and rubbed her eyes. To think I’ve been up all night, and there isn’t even a man in my room. I really must be crazy. She laughed, weakly. How can I be crazy and have a sense of the absurd?
But then why was she sitting here, if she wasn’t crazy? Why had she been sitting here all night, like someone condemned, waiting for the dawn? Why wasn’t she asleep in her bed like any normal human being—? She swiveled her chair to look at the rumpled sleeping bag on the cot. Because when she slept the pull was stronger, it pried open her dreams and painted the walls of her mind with the red walls of the Valley, and led her, again and again, to an unknown destination. . . .
“Oh, stop it.” She shut her eyes, and turned back to the desk. She wasn’t obsessed; she was just upset. Why shouldn’t she be upset—that damned Mitradati! Her fist tightened on the graffiti-covered blotter. That egotistical tin god. So he was sending her back to “civilization” today, was he? So her poor, frail little mind needed a rest, did it? Just wait until she got back to Little Earth and made her complaint. They’d let her conduct her investigation without interference, they’d see that her judgments weren’t irrational. And that narrow-minded apeman could go suck an egg…Better yet, why couldn’t she take one of the buggies, and go to the place first? She’d find her proof, she knew where to look, exactly where—
She got up from her chair, shaking her head, and began to move restlessly around the small room. Think about something else, anything else…My God, am I really losing my mind? This isn’t normal. Maybe it would be best to get away from here, for a while; from Mitradati, from—the artifact. She hadn’t been up to the pole in weeks, hadn’t seen a movie, or had a decent dinner, or called Fred. And stuck here with this baker’s half-dozen of impossible—No. She couldn’t really blame them. Who had been more impossible than she had, these past two weeks?
She looked over at Elke’s unused bed, under the curve where the ceiling became the outer wall. Elke had been sleeping with Sergei lately, and she suspected it was as much from uneasiness about her as it was from passion. At least Elke was sympathetic, and supportive…but Elke was a meteorologist, not a geologist, and what did she know? And Sergei, with his damned Russian obsession about parapsychology; making the whole idea sound like something out of a Grade Z science fiction movie. She was glad he had Elke to distract him, before his endless prying curiosity made her do something she would regret.
She saw the cigarettes and lighter Elke had left on the stool by her cot. She picked up the pack mindlessly, took out a cigarette, lit it, inhaled—and, coughing disgustedly, ground it out with her slipper on the cold metal floor. At least I haven’t gone completely insane. She went back to the desk, looked at the clock again. 4:43. Dawn…soon it would be dawn. But why was dawn so important? The hopper wouldn’t be going to the north pole until afternoon, on their bi-weekly supply run; this time taking her along in disgrace at Mitradati’s order. That was why she was upset, and angry, why she couldn’t stop thinking about the artifact—
The artifact: she had seen it lying like a diamond in the rubbly detritus along a canyon wall, twelve days ago, as she and Mitradati had collected rock specimens. And the moment she had seen it, touched it, she had known, she had known—It appeared to be a lump of fused ore, unusual, but not extraordinary. Yet somehow she had sensed an unrightness about it, an unnaturalness. And when she had tested it and found an alloy that had never been known to form outside of a laboratory, she had dared to tell the others about her suspicion…about her belief: That this piece of metal could never have been produced by natural geologic processes, that it had been made by an intelligent, alien life-form. And furthermore, that its presence could be a key to an even greater discovery—proof that humanity was not alone.
The reaction had been immediate, and negative. Even she had realized—still realized—that the idea was incredible. Some of the others, Taro, Shailung, hadn’t been totally unreasonable; suggesting that it might be a piece of space junk, something from their orbital lab. But Shiraz Mitradati had rejected the idea coldly, in spite of having no better explanation—calling it, and by implication her judgment, irrational. She had argued with him, pointing out that her past work with an archeological crew had given her a feel for geological samples that were something more…that even a conservative estimate claimed observers from another star system would visit this one once in every million years; no time at all, in geologic terms.