Woman Who Loved the Moon (19 page)

The first men and women to go into warp space had come back insane, when they came back at all.

That discovery had resulted in the word hyperspace being shortened to the bitter exclamation:
The Hype.
Phillipa had seen—not met, you could not call it a meeting—some of these returnees; people of immense courage and hope, shut in a box bounded by the bone of their skulls, locked into an internal reality so cohesive and demanding that the most skilled therapists, the most powerful telepaths, and all the drugs in the world could not touch them. The Hype had done that to them. The Hype could do that to me. It would be like climbing endlessly within a mountain range of ice; clear, smooth, reflecting ice, ice like a mirror, so that wherever you went you saw only, in a hundred thousand different distortions, your own face.

Stop that!

“Hey.” Xavier bobbed up in front of her, his clown’s face a mask of concern. “What’re you doing, just sitting here? Come and eat dinner.”

Phillipa looked around. The Core was empty; the engineers had gone. “Now why the hell didn’t they tell me?” she grumbled. But she knew why; they most likely hadn’t seen her. Creeping autism, she thought. I’m not real to them anymore, none of us are. Only machines are real. They forgot that I might want to eat. The Drive doesn’t.

“You’re looking better.”

“Maybe hallucinating is good for me.”

“Doubt it,” grunted Xavier.

“I gather nobody else has seen a thing.”

“Nothing but rocks and ice and snow and those damn vines. But if anybody has a similar vision I’ll let you know.”

“If they start seeing naked albinos creeping around—”

“I’ll apologize.”

Xavier was afraid. She could feel his fear. He was afraid of what was happening to her, to him, to them all. “We’re all right, Zave,” she said gently. “We’re all right and we’re going to get home safe. What’s there to stop us?”

“Imaginary albino telepaths,” Zave said. “I don’t mind you hallucinating aliens, Phil, but naked humans, in a place where no human would ever survive naked—why human?”

“I guess it means I want to go home, Zave.”

* * *

After dinner she went to her cubicle and lay down. She thought about home, Terra, Earth they called it once. Now there were colonies on many planets. She made a litany of their names and sang it: New Terra, New Terrain, Nexus Comp-center, Ley, Pellin, Azure, Ambience, Altair, Enchanter, Skell—all with bright suns and flowers and years made of days, not days made of years. It was hard to concentrate: her thoughts kept sliding into the ice and darkness outside the walls. Go to the Infirmary. Get Mickey to take a look at you. What for? It’s my mind. Nobody can heal my mind, except another telepath. She started to walk to the Infirmary anyway, tripping all the light shields as she passed them, because it was important that as little of the darkness as possible get into the ship. She could see it, in her mind’s eye, pressing on the windows, trying to creep in.

Takeo and Zave and Seth were standing in the hall. “I’m going to take a walk,” Takeo said. “How much time have I got?”

“About an hour,” said the captain.

“I won’t stay out that long, it’s cold out there, man!”

“I’ll come with you,” Seth said. “I want to hack off a few more plant samples.” Cold out there. Was Cold trying to get into the ship, with the dark? She didn’t want him. She would tell him that, she would go to him and tell him to stay out of the ship, stay away, stay out of my mind. She was a telepath, he was a telepath, she could talk to him.

She crept down the corridor after Takeo.

* * *

The wind on the tundra numbed cheeks and fingers and toes. Takeo and Seth had put on their LT suits, and they trundled along like obscene mummified snowmen, Phillipa, walking unseen in the shadows, felt winged in comparison. She let them get ahead of her, and then turned. What would the animals in the crevices of the rocks think of die strange beings stomping at them? She laughed. They would barely notice her. She had been there before—she was not a stranger anymore.

The darkness seemed pleasant now, natural, not threatening at all. The ice rustled and chattered around her as she walked into a maze of tall crags. Soon she could not see the ship’s lights. She walked through darkness until a white hand came out of the night and led her into a cave. There was a fire leaping within a rocky niche. It lit the interior with a sullen glow. “Am I dreaming you?” Phillipa said to the alien. “Are you only something in my mind?”

“I am real,” said the soft voice.

Phillipa said, “Why do you look human? Why are you naked?”

“I am
Myrkt
.”

A name? Yes, but not a personal name, a racial name. “I don’t understand,” Phillipa said. Even here, by the fire, the cold numbed her mind.

“We are—chameleon? Yes. That word. To you I am human. To a Verdian I will be a Verdian. To a fish, a fish. To the rock-lizards I am a scaly god.”

“Are there more of you?”

“I am alone here.”

“Are there any more like you? Where is your home-world, your home?”

“Home? What is home? I live here. One lives there.” The white arm flung out, pointing at the stars. “One lives there. One lives there. That is all. There are no more.”

Not human. “How long have you been here?”

“A day and a night, of this world.”

A day and a night of this world was a thousand years.

“Phillipa!” a voice boomed at her. “Phil, turn on your communicator. Phil!” Silence, and then it began again. “Phil!”

What could you do for a thousand years? The alien touched her, drew her deeper into the cave. Eyes sparkled at her, scores of them, unblinking, unmoving. Animals, birds, fish, people, great sculptures made of ice. There was a bird with outflung wings, and a woman bending her body into a hoop to the ground, and a giant beetle with outjutting claws. A voice still called her name. The fire in the niche leaped higher, and the ice sculptures shone. The Myrkt’s skin glittered like the things he had made.

“What is human?” said the Myrkt.

Human is...”There are patterns,” Phillipa said. For a moment she thought of tall blond Andresson. Andresson, that is human. How did you get in here, Kirsten? “There are twenty-two, no, twenty-five patterns. Twelve Verdian patterns. That is human, those mental patterns.”

“What is alien? Am I? I look like you.”

“You can look like anything, you told me.”

“Did I?” A woman’s voice. A woman in white stood by her, with frosty hair. Phillipa knew her. Named her.

“The Ice Princess.”

“What is that?” The black eyes were rapacious. “Tell me.”

“The Ice Princess lives on top of a mountain of ice. She is very beautiful, but she has no heart. Men climb the ice mountain for love of her beauty, and perish in the cold and the dark. The mountain is covered with bodies, frozen bodies of men, dogs, birds, fishes, beetles...” That’s not how it goes! She couldn’t remember. The ice in the cave glittered terribly.

“Was she human?”

“I don’t know,” Phillipa said. “She could have been, but she had no heart.”

“What is that—heart? Heart is like a pattern? How may I get it?” A white face stooped to hers. It was a burning cinder, a cold star. Palms touched her face.

Cold—cold as death, cold as cold metal burning against bare skin. Illusion swirled and changed and died. Inside her mind something spoke to her, telling of loss, of loneliness, of desperate greed. Then the pictures shattered.

They found her at last after a four-hour search, crouching in a corner of rock and ice, in a cave, unseeing and silent as the ice. She was alive, that was all. Mickey felt her all over. “Nothing broken. Phillipa? Phil?” They could not rouse her. At last they made a cradle and carried her between them, limp, out of the grotesquely embellished cave. And Xavier, using his heavy metal searchlight as a club, hammered at as many of the statues as he could reach until a rubble of broken ice littered the frozen lightless ground.

The Man Who Was Pregnant

Riding on a San Francisco bus one afternoon, I saw a stranger, a man, wearing a bright orange caftan. He looked pregnant. From that glimpse came this story. It was remarkably easy to write and now, when people come to me and say, “But what’s it about?” I grumble and mutter and change the subject.

* * *

He was an unlikely looking man to be a mother: tall, with a bushy brown beard and long hair, stolidly and solidly male. He was hairy and not very strong. As a child he had been fat. He liked loose clothes; tunics, dashikis. The first thing he did when he realized he was pregnant was buy a bright orange caftan and hang it away in his closet. Sometimes he would touch it, the coarse sturdy cotton like the kind bedspreads are made from, and picture himself inside it, swelling it out like a tent. Both his sisters had worn maternity clothes during their respective pregnancies and would have been glad to lend him shirts and tunics, but he preferred the somewhat asexual look of the caftan. It lent dignity to an otherwise puzzling and slightly ridiculous event.

He was unsure how he could be pregnant. He had had all the usual childhood diseases and examinations. In 1969 during his Army physical (he had been rejected for active duty for a heart murmur about which he had never known and which never gave him any trouble) doctors had probed and palpated and x-rayed (it seemed) every inch of him and had found no anomalies, nothing out of place, no extra organs. He went to the main library and looked for other cases like his own. The librarian directed him to the references on sympathetic pregnancies. He read them dutifully but they told him nothing. There was no such thing, after all, as a sympathetic rabbit test. He
was
pregnant.

It was even more of a puzzle to him how he could have gotten pregnant. His sex life was healthy. He was between attachments but had two steady liaisons going, one with Louise who worked in a bookstore, the other with Sandy who waited tables in a men’s bar. Louise could clearly have had nothing to do with the event, and therefore Sandy must have—but the logistics seemed shaky. His sisters made rude and ribald comments about virgin births.

The doctors at first simply refused to believe that he was pregnant, despite all their test results. They decided that he was crazy, or hoaxing them, or that he had a “mass” or lesion or a hernia or anything but a baby growing inside him. The woman doctor who examined him was just as intransigent as the men. They wanted to keep him in the hospital, they told him. He realized that they wanted to keep him the full nine months. He decided that this was an unnatural situation in which to have a baby and signed out AMA, which meant against medical advice.

His sisters, Ruth and Nancy, swung between sisterly concern and incredulity. It did not help that they were both older than he. When he started getting morning sickness in his third month they told him to cut out all the coffee before lunch. It worked. They could both sew, he had never learned; he brought his pants to them to open the waistbands and seams.

He started “showing” at the fourth month. By the fifth he was able to take the caftan from its hanger and slip it on. He wore T-shirts under the caftan. One morning he left off the T-shirt. The coarse fabric rubbed his nipples pleasantly. He stopped wearing T-shirts altogether. He liked sunlight. The window of his studio faced south; he moved his bed into the area of sun. During the day he lay naked on the bed, drenched in sun, touching himself—his nipples, his cock, and the swelling flesh between. He masturbated. It was dizzying to feel his cock stiffen in one palm, and pass his other palm over the soft stretched skin of his belly.

One afternoon as he caressed himself the baby moved, kicked. He cried out. The baby was there, alive, there.

He was a printer, but he had been unemployed for nearly a year and had gotten used to daytime solitude. Every once in a while he missed the companionship of the shop. But he had always preferred having lovers to having friends. He visited Louise at the bookstore. She liked to chat with him, she even set aside baby books for him to look at, but she would not visit his apartment. He was too shy to go into the men’s bars; his relationship with Sandy came to an abrupt but natural end.

He spent a lot of time with his sisters and their friends. At night he read or watched television. His downstairs neighbors, a couple with a two-year-old son, invited him to dinner. He went. They were vegetarians. After dinner they passed a joint. Sara remarked that she had smoked dope all through her pregnancy and that Jorma (named after Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane) didn’t seem the worse for it. Tony said that he had read that it was okay after the fifth month. Jorma fell asleep on the floor.

In the seventh month he got tremendously depressed. The abnormality of his state began to terrify him. There was no one like him in the world, no one to reassure him or tell him what to do. How could he have a baby? Where would it come out? He read in his books about ectopic pregnancies. He contemplated going back to the hospital but could not see how that would help. The doctors knew less than he. He stopped going out, except to buy food at a comer store. He watched a lot of television, even daytime television, although the game shows repelled him. He sat in his window and watched the traffic pass on the street below. His back hurt.