"I don't give a damn whether it was necessary or not," I said.
"I liked it."
IX
It takes four hours to cross the Atlantic, three to shuttle to a different latitude. Waking up in a Vermont autumn morning, inside the glass cab, while all around us the maples and sugar maples wheel slowly out of the fog. Only this part of the world can produce such color. We whispered at a walking pace through wet fires. Electric vehicles are quiet, too; we heard the drip of water from the leaves. When the house saw us, my old round lollipop-on-a-stick, it lit up from floor to top, and as we came nearer broadcast the Second Brandenburg through the black, wet tree-trunks and the fiery leaves, a delicate attention I allow myself and my guests from time to time. Shouting brilliantly through the wet woods-I prefer the unearthy purity of the electronic scoring. One approaches the house from the side, where it looks almost flat on its central column-only a little convex, really-it doesn't squat down for you on chicken legs like Baba Yaga's hut, but lets down from above a great, coiling, metal-mesh road like a tongue (or so it seems; in reality it's only a winding staircase). Inside you find yourself a corridor away from the main room; no use wasting heat.
Davy was there. The most beautiful man in the world. Our approach had given him time to make drinks for us-which the J's took from his tray, staring at him but he wasn't embarrassed-curled up most unwaiterlike at my feet with his hands around his knees and proceeded to laugh at the right places in the conversation (he takes his cues from my face).
The main room is panelled in yellow wood with a carpet you can sleep on (brown) and a long, glassed-in porch from which we watch the blizzards sweep by five months out of the year. I like purely visual weather. It's warm enough for Davy to go around naked most of the time, my ice lad in a cloud of gold hair and nudity, never so much a part of my home as when he sits on the rug with his back against a russet or vermilion chair (we mimic autumn here), his drowned blue eyes fixed on the winter sunset outside, his hair" turned to ash, the muscles of his back and thighs stirring a little. The house hangs oddments from the ceiling; found objects, mobiles, can openers, red balls, bunches of wild grass, and Davy plays with them.
I showed the Js around: the books, the microfilm viewer in the library in touch with our regional library miles away, the storage spaces in the walls, the various staircases, the bathrooms molded of glass fiber and put together from two pieces, the mattresses stored in the walls of the guest rooms, and the conservatory (near the central core, to make use of the heat) where Davy comes and mimics wonder, watching the lights shine on my orchids, my palmettos, my bougainvillea, my whole little mess of tropical plants. I even have a glassed-in space for cacti. There are outside plantings where in season you can find mountain laurel, a tangled maze of rhododendron, scattered irises that look like an expensive and antique cross between insects and lingerie-but these are under snow now. I even have an electrified fence, inherited from my predecessor, that encloses the whole estate to keep out the deer and occasionally kills trees which take the mild climate around the house a little too much for granted.
I let the J's peep into the kitchen, which is an armchair with controls like a 707's, but not the place where I store my tools and from which I have access to the central core when House has indigestion. That's dirty and you need to know what you're doing. I showed them Screen, which keeps me in touch with my neighbors, the nearest of whom is ten miles away, Telephone, who is my long-distance backup line, and Phonograph, where I store my music.
Jeannine said she didn't like her drink; it wasn't sweet enough. So I had Davy dial her another.
Do you want dinner? (She blushed.)
My palace and gardens (said I) I acquired late in life when I became rich and influential; before that I lived in one of the underground cities among the damnedest passel of neighbors you ever saw, sentimental Arcadian communes-underground, mind you!-whose voices would travel up the sewer pipes at all the wrong times of day and night, shrill sacrifices to love and joy when you want to sleep, ostentatious shuddering whenever I appeared in the corridor, wincing and dashing back inside to huddle together like kittens, conscious of their own innocence, and raise their pure young voices in the blessedness of community song. You know the kind: "But we were having fun!" in a soft, wondering, highly reproachful voice while she closes the door gently but firmly on your thumb. They thought I was Ultimate Evil. They let me know it. They are the kind who want to win the men over by Love. There's a game called Pussycat that's great fun for the player; it goes like this: Meeow, I'm dead (lying on your back, all four paws engagingly held in the air, playing helpless); there's another called Saint George and the Dragon with You Know Who playing You Know What; and when you can no longer tolerate either, you do as I did: come home in a hobgoblin-head of a disguise, howling and chasing your neighbors down the hall while they scream in genuine terror (well, sort of).
Then I moved.
That was my first job, impersonating one of the Manlanders' police (for ten minutes). By "job" I don't mean what I was sent to do last night, that was open and legitimate, but a "job" is a little bit under the table. It took me years to throw off the last of my Pussy-fetters, to stop being (however brutalized) vestigially Pussy-cat-ified, but at last I did and now I am the rosy, wholesome, single-minded assassin you see before you today.
I come and go as I please. I do only what I want. I have wrestled myself through to an independence of mind that has ended by bringing all of you here today. In short, I am a grown woman.
I was an old-fashioned girl, born forty-two years ago in the last years before the war, in one of the few mixed towns still left. It amazes me sometimes to think of what my life would have been like without the war, but I ended up in a refugee camp with my mother. Maddened Lesbians did not put cigarette butts out on her breasts, propaganda to the contrary; in fact she got a lot more self-confident and whacked me when I tore to pieces (out of pure curiosity) a paper doily that decorated the top of the communal radio-this departure from previous practice secretly gratified me and I decided I rather liked the place.
We were re-settled and I was sent to school once the war cooled off; by '52 our territories had shrunk to pretty much what they are today, and we've grown too wise since to think we can gain anything by merely annexing land. I was trained for years-we deplore what we must nonetheless use!-and began my slow drift away from the community, that specialization (they say) that brings you closer to the apes, though I don't see how such an exceedingly skilled and artificial practice can be anything but quintessentially human.
At twelve I artlessly told one of my teachers that I was very glad I was being brought up to be a man-woman, and that I looked down on those girls who were only brought up to be woman-women. I'll never forget her face. She did not thrash me but let an older girl-girl do it-I told you I was old-fashioned.
Gradually this sort of thing wears off; not everything with claws and teeth is a Pussycat. On the contrary!
My first job (as I told you) was impersonating one of the Manlander police; my most recent one was taking the place of a Manlander diplomat for eighteen months in a primitive patriarchy on an alternate Earth. Oh yes, the Men also have probability-travel, or rather they have it through us; we run the routine operations for them. So far has corruption progressed! With my silver hair, my silver eyes, and my skin artificially darkened to make me look even stranger to the savages, I was presented as a Prince of Faery, and in that character I lived in a dank stone castle with ghastly sanitary arrangements and worse beds for a year and a half. A place that would make your hair stand on end. Jeannine must stop looking so skeptical-please reflect that some societies stylize their adult roles to such a degree that a giraffe could pass for a man, especially with seventy-seven layers of clothes on, and a barbarian prudery that keeps you from ever taking them off. They were impossible people. I used to make up stories about the Faery women; once I killed a man because he said something obscene about the Faery women. Think of that! You must imagine me as the quiet, serene Christian among the pagans, the courteous magician among the blunt men-o'-war, the overcivilized stranger (possibly a Demon because he was understood to have no beard) who spoke softly and never accepted challenges, but who was not afraid of anything under Heaven and who had a grip of steel. And so on. Oh, those cold baths! And the endless joking about how they weren't queer, by God! And the bellicosity, the continual joshing that catches in your skin like thorns and exasperates you almost to murder, and the constant fingering of sex and womankind with its tragic, pitiable bafflement and its even worse bragging; and last of all the perpetual losing battle with fear, the constant unloading of anxious weaknesses on to others (and their consequent enraged fury) as if fear and weakness were not the best guides we human beings ever had! Oh, it was rich!