The Female Man

distrust of the mother and the reluctance to form a tie that will engage every level of emotion, all the person, all the time. And the necessity for artificial dissatisfactions.

“Without which” (says Dunyasha Bernadetteson, op. cit.) “we would become so happy we would sit down on our fat, pretty behinds and soon we would start starving, nyet?'

But there is too, under it all, the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries, mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies and circular mathematical proofs (over which aficionados are moved to tears), and the best graffiti in this or any other world.

Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work.

VII

Two ancients on the direct computer line between city and quarry (private persons have to be content with spark-gap radio), fighting at the top of their lungs while five green girls wait nearby, sulky and bored:

I can’t make do with five greenies; I need two on-foot checkers and protective gear for one!

Can’t have.

Incomp-

?

You hear.

Is me!

(affected disdain)

If catastroph—

Won’t!

And so on.

VIII

A troop of little girls contemplating three silver hoops welded to a silver cube are laughing so hard that some have fallen down into the autumn leaves on the plaza and are holding their stomachs. This is not embarrassment or an ignorant reaction to something new; they are genuine connoisseurs who have hiked for three days to see this. Their hip-packs lie around the edge of the plaza, near the fountains. One: How lovely!

IX

Between shifts in the quarry in Newland, Henla Anaisson sings, her only audience her one fellow- worker.

A Belin, run mad and unable to bear the tedious-ness of her work, flees above the forty-eighth parallel, intending to remain there permanently. “You” (says an arrogant note she leaves behind) “do not exist” and although agreeing philosophically with this common view, the S & P for the county follows her—not to return her for rehabilitation, imprisonment, or study. What is there to rehabilitate or study? We’d all do it if we could. And imprisonment is simple cruelty.

You guessed it.

XI

“If not me or mine,” (wrote Dunyasha Bernadetteson in 368 A.C.) “O.K.

“If me or mine—alas.

“If us and ours—watch out!”

XII

Whileaway is engaged in the reorganization of industry consequent to the discovery of the induction principle.

The Whileawayan work-week is sixteen hours.

PART FOUR

I

After six months of living with me in the hotel suite, Janet Evason expressed the desire to move in with a typical family. I heard her singing in the bathroom:

I know

That my

Rede-emer

Liveth

And She

Shall stand

Upon the latter da-ay (ruffle)

On Earth.

“Janet?” She sang again (not badly) the second variation on the lines, in which the soprano begins to decorate the tune:

I know (up)

Tha-at my (ruffle)

Re-e-edeemer (fiddle)

Liveth

And She

Shall stand (convex)