Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (397 page)

Fan studies scholarship includes analyses of the fraught relationship and power differential between fans and TPTB, ethnographic studies of the organization and structure of fan groups and communities, articulations of fans’ strategies for constructing meaning, and close studies of the fan artworks themselves. But I would argue that all this scholarly interpretation is mirrored by the fans’ work: their creative artworks are interpretations of the canonical source and are themselves a form of textual criticism. For example, positing a homosexual love relationship between Kirk and Spock rejects Spock’s presentation in the original
Star Trek
as emotionally void, even as it critiques Kirk’s girl-of-the-week love interests by providing him with an equal partner worthy of him. Moving the characters to a new time or setting, as in a crossover or AU, throws them into a new milieu that they must navigate and that must be examined—and that navigation will reveal something new about the characters. Even apparently pointless PWPs provide insight into the characters and their desires—and those of the author, of course. Fan activity is concerned with the endless making of meaning—making their own texts, critiquing the canonical texts, and creating a community to disseminate and consume these meanings.

* * * *

Karen Hellekson
is an independent scholar in science fiction and media studies and has published work on the alternate history, Cordwainer Smith, Fandom Wank, and soap operas. She is a founding coeditor of the online-only fan studies journal
Transformative Works and Cultures.

(1948– )

I had originally asked to include Vonda N. McIntyre’s Nebula Award–winning signature story, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” (1973) which became the opening of the Hugo and Nebula–winning novel
Dreamsnake
. It’s a beautiful story, and my favorite of hers, but she correctly pointed out that it’s been reprinted, well, everywhere, and wouldn’t my students rather see a more recent piece of writing? “Little Faces,” like “Mist” has an incredibly distinctive voice, and characters you like and identify with even though you don’t understand them. And both are extraordinarily sensual stories, although this one has alien sexuality and “Mist” has… snakes.

McIntyre was one of the first Clarion graduates (1970) to become a successful SF writer, and she helped found Clarion West in the early seventies. McIntyre’s first story sale was “Breaking Point” (1970), and by 1975 her first novel,
The Exile Waiting
, was published. She’s still best remembered for
Dreamsnake
, but subsequent novels include
Superluminal
(1983) and the four-book Starfarers series,
Starfarers
(1989),
Transition
(1990),
Metaphase
(1992), and
Nautilus
(1994). She won a Nebula for her lavish
The Moon and the Sun
(1997), a novel set in a seventeenth-century France that straddles the line between alternate history and fantasy. She is also well-known to
Star Trek
and Star Wars fans for novelizations and original tie-in novels.

McIntyre is a founding member of Book View Café, a prominent ebook website.

First published in
SciFiction
, February 2005

The blood woke Yalnis. It ran between her thighs, warm and slick, cooling, sticky. She pushed back from the stain on the silk, bleary with sleep and love, rousing to shock and stabbing pain.

She flung off the covers and scrambled out of bed. She cried out as the web of nerves tore apart. Her companions shrieked a chaotic chorus.

Zorargul’s small form convulsed just below her navel. The raw edges of a throat wound bled in diminishing gushes. Her body expelled the dying companion, closing off veins and vesicles.

Zorargul was beyond help. She wrapped her hand around the small broken body as it slid free. She sank to the floor. Blood dripped onto the cushioned surface. The other companions retreated into her, exposing nothing but sharp white teeth that parted and snapped in defense and warning.

Still in bed, blinking, yawning, Seyyan propped herself on her elbow. She gazed at the puddle of blood. It soaked in, vanishing gradually from edge to center, drawn away to be separated into its molecules and stored.

A smear of blood marked Seyyan’s skin. Her first companion blinked its small bright golden eyes. It snapped its sharp teeth, spattering scarlet droplets. It shrieked, licked its bloody lips, cleaned its teeth with its tongue. The sheet absorbed the blood spray.

Seyyan lay back in the soft tangled nest, elegantly lounging, her luxuriant brown hair spilling its curls around her bare shoulders and over her delicate perfect breasts. She shone like molten gold in the starlight. Her other companions pushed their little faces from her belly, rousing themselves and clacking their teeth, excited and jealous.

“Zorargul,” Yalnis whispered. She had never lost a companion. She chose them carefully, and cherished them, and Zorargul had been her first, the gift of her first lover. She looked up at Seyyan, confused and horrified, shocked by loss and pain.

“Come back.” Seyyan spoke with soft urgency. She stretched out her graceful hand. “Come back to bed.” Her voice intensified. “Come back to me.”

Yalnis shrank from her touch. Seyyan followed, sliding over the fading bloodstain in the comfortable nest of ship silk. Her first companion extruded itself, just below her navel, staring intently at Zorargul’s body.

Seyyan stroked Yalnis’s shoulder. Yalnis pushed her away with her free hand, leaving bloody fingerprints on Seyyan’s golden skin.

Seyyan grabbed her wrist and held her, moved to face her squarely, touched her beneath her chin and raised her head to look her in the eyes. Baffled and dizzy, Yalnis blinked away tears. Her remaining companions pumped molecular messages of distress and anger into her blood.

“Come back to me,” Seyyan said again. “We’re ready for you.”

Her first companion, drawing back into her, pulsed and muttered. Seyyan caught her breath.

“I never asked for this!” Yalnis cried.

Seyyan sat back on her heels, as lithe as a girl, but a million years old.

“I thought you wanted me,” she said. “You welcomed me—invited me—took me to your bed—”

Yalnis shook her head, though it was true. “Not for this,” she whispered.

“It didn’t even fight,” Seyyan said, dismissing Zorargul’s remains with a quick gesture. “It wasn’t worthy of its place with you.”

“Who are you to decide that?”

“I didn’t,” Seyyan said. “It’s the way of companions.” She touched the reddening bulge of a son-spot just below the face of her first companion. “This one will be worthy of you.”

Yalnis stared at her, horrified and furious. Seyyan, the legend, had come to her, exotic, alluring, and exciting. All the amazement and attraction Yalnis felt washed away in Zorargul’s blood.

“I don’t want it,” she said. “I won’t accept it.”

Seyyan’s companion reacted to the refusal, blinking, snarling. For a moment Yalnis feared Seyyan too would snarl at her, assault her and force a new companion upon her.

Seyyan sat back, frowning in confusion. “But I thought—did you invite me, just to refuse me? Why—?”

“For pleasure,” Yalnis said. “For friendship. And maybe for love—maybe you would offer, and I would accept—”

“How is this different?” Seyyan asked.

Yalnis leaped to her feet in a flare of fury so intense that her vision blurred. Cradling Zorargul’s shriveling body against her with one hand, she pressed the other against the aching bloody wound beneath her navel.

“Get out of my ship,” she said.

The ship, responding to Yalnis’s wishes, began to resorb the nest into the floor.

Seyyan rose. “What did you think would happen,” she said, anger replacing the confusion in her tone, “when you announced the launch of a daughter? What do you think everyone is coming for? I was just lucky enough to be first. Or unfortunate enough.” Again, she brushed her long fingertips against the son-spot. It pulsed, a red glow as hot and sore as infection. It must find a place, soon, or be stillborn. “And what am I to do with this?”

Yalnis’s flush of anger drained away, leaving her pale and shocked.

“I don’t care.” All the furnishings and softness of the room vanished, absorbed into the pores of Yalnis’s ship, leaving bare walls and floor, and the cold stars above. “You didn’t even ask me,” Yalnis said softly.

“You led me to believe we understood each other. But you’re so young—” Seyyan reached toward her. Yalnis drew back, and Seyyan let her hand fall with a sigh. “So young. So naïve.” She caught up her purple cloak from the floor and strode past Yalnis. Though the circular chamber left plenty of room, she brushed past close to Yalnis, touching her at shoulder and hip, bare skin to bare skin. A lock of her hair swept across Yalnis’s belly, stroking low like a living hand, painting a bloody streak.

Seyyan entered the pilus that connected Yalnis’s ship with her own craft. As soon as Seyyan crossed the border, Yalnis’s ship disconnected and closed and healed the connection.

Yalnis’s ship emitted a few handsful of plasma in an intemperate blast, moving itself to a safer distance. Seyyan’s craft gleamed and glittered against the starfield, growing smaller as Yalnis’s ship moved away, coruscating with a pattern of prismatic color.

Yalnis sank to the floor again, humiliated and grief-stricken. Without her request or thought, her ship cushioned her from its cold living bones, growing a soft surface beneath her, dimming the light to dusk. Dusk, not the dawn she had planned.

She gazed down at Zorargul’s small body. Its blood pooled in her palm. She drew her other hand from the seeping wound where Zorargul had lived and cradled the shriveling tendril of the companion’s penis. A deep ache, throbbing regularly into pain, replaced the potential for pleasure as her body knit the wound of Zorargul’s passing. Behind the wound, a sore, soft mass remained.

“Zorargul,” she whispered, “you gave me such

pleasure.”

Of her companions, Zorargul had most closely patterned the lovemaking of its originator. Her pleasure always mingled with a glow of pride, that Zorar thought enough of her to offer her a companion.

Yalnis wondered where Zorar was, and if she would come to Yalnis’s daughter’s launching. They had not communicated since they parted. Zorar anticipated other adventures, and her ship yearned for deep space. She might be anywhere, one star system away, or a dozen, or setting out to another cluster, voyaging through vacuum so intense and a region so dark she must conserve every molecule of mass and every photon of energy, using none to power a message of acceptance, or regret, or goodwill.

Yalnis remained within parallax view of her own birthplace. She had grown up in a dense population of stars and people. She had taken a dozen lovers in her life, and accepted five companions: Zorargul, Vasigul, Asilgul, Hayaligul, and Bahadirgul. With five companions, she felt mature enough, wealthy enough, to launch a daughter with a decent, even lavish, settlement. After that, she could grant her ship’s need—and her own desire—to set out on adventures and explorations.

Zorar, she thought—

She reached for Zorar’s memories and reeled into loss and emptiness. The memories ended with Zorargul’s murder. Zorar, much older than Yalnis, had given her the gift of her own long life of journeys and observations. They brought her the birth of stars and worlds, the energy storm of a boomerang loop around a black hole, skirting the engulfing doom of its event horizon. They brought her the most dangerous adventure of all, a descent through the thick atmosphere of a planet to its living surface.

All Yalnis had left were her memories of the memories, dissolving shadows of the gift. All the memories left in Zorargul had been wiped out by death.

By murder.

The walls and floor of her living space changed again as her ship re-created her living room. She liked it plain but luxurious, all softness and comfort. The large circular space lay beneath a transparent dome. It was a place for one person alone. She patted the floor with her bloodstained hand.

“Thank you,” she said.

“True,” her ship whispered into her mind.

Its decisions often pleased her and anticipated her wishes. Strange, for ships and people seldom conversed. When they tried, the interaction too easily deteriorated into misunderstanding. Their consciousnesses were of different types, different evolutionary lineages.

She rose, lacking her usual ease of motion. Anger and pain and grief drained her, and exhaustion trembled in her bones.

She carried Zorargul’s body down through the ship, down into its heart, down to the misty power plant. Blood, her own and her companion’s, spattered and smeared her hands, her stomach, her legs, the defending teeth or withdrawn crowns of her remaining companions, and Zorargul’s pale and flaccid corpse. Its nerve ends dried to silver threads. Expulsion had reduced the testicles to wrinkled empty sacs.

Water ran in streams and pools through the power plant’s housing, cold as it came in, steaming too hot to touch as it led away. Where steam from the hot pool met cold air, mist formed. Yalnis knelt and washed Zorargul’s remains in the cold pool. When she was done, a square of scarlet ship silk lay on the velvety floor, flat and new where it had formed. She wrapped Zorargul in its shining folds.

“Good-bye,” she said, and gave the small bundle tenderly to the elemental heat.

A long time later, Yalnis made her way to the living space and climbed into the bath, into water hot but not scalding. The bath swirled around her, sweeping away flecks of dried blood. She massaged the wound gently, making sure the nerve roots were cleanly ejected. She let the expulsion lump alone, though it was already hardening.

The remaining companions opened their little faces, protruding from the shelter of her body. They peered around, craning themselves above her skin, glaring at each other and gnashing their teeth in a great show, then closing their lips, humming to attract her attention.

She attended each companion in turn, stroking the little faces, flicking warm drops of water between their lips, quieting and calming them, murmuring, “Shh, shh.” They felt no sympathy for her loss, no grief for Zorargul, only the consciousness of opportunity. She felt a moment of contempt for the quartet, each member jostling for primacy.

They are what they are, she thought, and submerged herself and them in the bath, drawing their little faces beneath the surface. They fell silent, holding their breaths and closing their eyes and mouths, reaching to draw their oxygen as well as their sustenance from her blood. A wash of dizziness took her; she breathed deep till it passed.

Each of the companions tried to please her—no, Bahadirgul held back. Her most recent companion had always been restrained in its approaches, fierce in its affections when it achieved release. Now, instead of squirming toward her center, it relaxed and blew streams of delicate bubbles from the air in its residual lungs.

Yalnis smiled, and when she closed herself off from the companions, she shut Bahadirgul away more gently than the others. She did not want to consider any of the companions now. Zorargul had been the best, the most deeply connected, as lively and considerate as her first lover.

Tears leaked from beneath her lashes, hot against her cheeks, washing away when she submerged. She looked up at the stars through the shimmering surface, through the steam.

She lifted her head to breathe. Water rippled and splashed; air cooled her face. The companions remained underwater, silent. Yalnis’s tears flowed again and she sobbed, keening, grieving, wishing to take back the whole last time of waking. She wanted to change all her plans. If she did, Seyyan might take it as a triumph. She might make demands. Yalnis sneaked a look at the messages her ship kept ready for her attention. She declined to reply or even to acknowledge them. She felt it a weakness to read them. After she had, she wished she had resisted.

Why did you tantalize and tease me? Seyyan’s message asked. You know this was what you wanted. I’m what you wanted.

Yalnis eliminated everything else Seyyan had sent her.

“Please refuse Seyyan’s messages,” she said to her ship.

“True,” it replied.

“Disappear them, destroy them. No response.”

“True.”

“Seyyan, you took my admiration and my awe, and you perverted it,” she said, as if Seyyan stood before her. “I might have accepted you. I might have, if you’d given me a chance. If you’d given me time. What do we have, but time? I’ll never forgive you.”

The bath flowed away, resorbing into the ship’s substance. Warm air dried her and drew off the steam. She wrapped herself in a new swath of ship silk without bothering to give it a design. Some people went naked at home, but Yalnis liked clothes. For now, though, a cloak sufficed.