Picnic on Nearside (21 page)

“That’s the tough part. You can offer me reams of ‘proof’ that I’m wrong, and I can’t show you anything. If you’d been there when I’d killed that fellow, you’d know. But I can’t do it again.” She drew a deep breath, and seemed to settle in for a long debate.

“Let’s get back to these parasites,” Evelyn said. “They’re men? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, no.” She laughed, without humor. “There’s no such thing as a man, the way you’re thinking about it. Only women who’ve been taken over at birth by these, these . . .” she groped in the air for a word hideous enough to express her distaste. She couldn’t find it. “Things. Organisms. I said they invaded the Earth, but I’m not sure. They might be from here. There’s no way to know, they’ve taken over too completely.”

Leaves flexibility in her rationale
. Yes, that would fit with what the books said. It would be hard to stump her, to ask her a question she couldn’t answer in terms of her delusion. She admitted not knowing everything about the subject, and she was free to reject whole categories of argument as having been tampered with, like history.

“So how is it . . . no, wait. Maybe you’d better tell me more about these parasites. Where do they hide? How is it that no one but you is aware of them?”

She nodded. She now seemed totally serious. She could not joke about this subject when they got this specific.

“They’re not strictly parasites. They’re sort of symbiotic. They don’t kill their hosts, not quickly. They even help the host in the short run, making them stronger and larger and more capable of domination. But in the long run, they sap the strength of the host. They make her more susceptible to disease, weaken her heart. As to what they look like, you’ve seen them. They’re blind, helpless, immobile worms. They attach themselves to a woman’s urinary tract, filling and covering the vagina and extending nerves into the ovaries and uterus. They inject hormones into her body and cause her to grow up with deformities, like facial hair, enlarged muscles, reduced thinking capacity, and wildly defective emotions. The host becomes aggressive and murderous. Her breasts never develop. She is permanently sterile.”

Evelyn scribbled in her notebook to cover her emotions. She wanted to laugh; she felt like crying. Who could figure the human mind? She shuddered to think of the pressures that must have driven this outwardly normal woman to such a bizarre way of looking at the universe. Father? Lover? Was she raped? Barbara had been unhelpful in talking about these things, maintaining that they were no one’s business but her own. Besides, they had no bearing on what she saw as the facts of the case.

“I hardly know where to begin,” Evelyn said.

“Yes, I know. It’s not the sort of thing they’d allow you to seriously consider, is it? It’s too alien to what you’ve been led to believe. I’m sorry. I hope I can help you.”

Damn!
she wrote, then scratched it out.
Puts questioners on the defensive. Shows sympathy with their inability to see things as she sees them
.

“Call it the new biology,” Barbara said, getting up and slowly walking back and forth in the confined space. Her loose slippers slipped off her heels with each step. “I began to suspect it several years ago. The world just didn’t make
sense
any other way. You’ve got to begin to doubt what you’ve been told. You’ve got to trust the evidence of your intellect. You’ve got to allow yourself to look through your woman’s eyes as a
woman
would, not as an imperfect man would. They’ve trained you to believe in their values, their system. What you begin to realize is that they are imperfect women, not the other way around.
They can’t reproduce themselves
, shouldn’t that tell you something? ‘Males’ live on our
bodies as parasites, they use our fertility to perpetuate their species.” She turned to Evelyn, and her eyes were burning. “Can you try to look at it that way? Just try? Don’t try to be a man; redefine! You don’t know what you are. All your life you’ve struggled to be a man. They’ve defined the role you should play. And you’re not made for it. You don’t have that parasite eating at your brain. Can you accept that?”

“I can, for the sake of argument.”

“That’s good enough.”

Evelyn was treading cautiously. “Uh, just what do I have to do to . . . ‘see things as a woman?’ I feel like a woman right now.”

“
Feel!
That’s it, just feel. You know what ‘woman’s intuition’ is? It’s the human way to think. They’ve laughed at it to the point where we automatically distrust it. They
had
to; they’ve lost the capacity to see a truth intuitively. I can see you don’t like that phrase. You wouldn’t. It’s been laughed at so much that an ‘enlightened woman’ like yourself doesn’t believe it exists. That’s what they want you to think. All right, don’t use the word ‘intuition.’ Use something else. What I’m talking about is the innate capacity of a human being to feel the truth of a matter. We all know we have it, but we’ve been trained to distrust it. And it’s gotten screwed up. Haven’t you ever felt you’re right for no reason you could name except that you knew you were
right
?”

“Yes, I guess I have. Most people do.”
Rejects logical argument as being part of her oppression
. She decided to test that.

“What I’ve been . . . trained to do, is to apply the rules of logic to analyze a question. Right? And you say it’s no good, despite thousands of years of human experience?”

“That’s right. It’s not human experience, though. It’s a trick. It’s a game, a very complicated game.”

“What about science? Biology, in particular.”

“Science is the biggest game of all. Have you ever thought about it? Do you seriously feel that the big questions of the universe, the important truths that should be easily in our grasp, will be solved by scientists haggling over how many neutrinos can dance on the head of a pin? It’s a tail-eating snake, relevant only to itself. But once you accept the basic ground rules, you’re trapped. You think that counting and sorting and numbering will teach you things. You have to reject it all and see the world with
new eyes. You’ll be astounded at what is there, ready for you to pick up.”

“Genetics?”

“Hogwash. The whole structure of genetics has been put there to explain an untenable position: that there are two sexes, neither of them worthwhile alone, but together they’re able to reproduce. It doesn’t hold up when you think about it. Genes and chromosomes, half from each parent: no, no, no! Tell me, have you ever seen a gene?”

“I’ve seen pictures.”

“Hah!” That seemed enough for the moment. She paced the floor, overwhelmed by the scope of it. She turned again and faced Evelyn.

“I know, I know. I’ve thought about it enough. There’s this . . . this basic set of assumptions we all live by. We can’t get along without accepting almost all of it, right? I mean, I could tell you that I don’t believe in . . . Tokyo, for instance, that Tokyo doesn’t exist simply because I haven’t been there to see it for myself. The news films I’ve seen were all clever hoaxes, right? Travelogues, books, Japanese; they’re all in a conspiracy to make me think there’s such a place as Tokyo.”

“You could make a case for it, I guess.”

“Sure I could. We all exist,
all
of us, in our own heads, looking out through the eyeballs. Society isn’t possible unless we can believe in second-hand reports of certain things. So we’ve all conspired together to accept what other people tell us unless we can think of a reason why we’re being lied to. Society can be seen as a conspiracy of unquestioning acceptance of unprovable things. We all work together at it, we all define a set of things as needing no proof.”

She started to say more, but shut her mouth. She seemed to be considering if she should go on. She looked speculatively at Evelyn.

Evelyn shifted on her cot. Outside, the sun was setting in a haze of red and yellow. Where had the day gone? What time had she come into this room, anyway? She was unsure. Her stomach grumbled at her, but she wasn’t too uncomfortable. She was fascinated. She felt a sort of lassitude, a weakness that made her want to lie down on the bed.

“Where was I? Oh, the untested assumptions. Okay. If we can’t accept anything that’s told us, we can’t function in society. You can get away with not accepting a lot. You can believe the world is flat, or that there are no such things as photons or black holes or genes. Or that Christ didn’t rise from the grave. You can go a long way from the majority opinion. But if you evolve an entirely new world picture, you start to get in trouble.”

“What’s most dangerous of all,” Evelyn pointed out, “is starting to live by these new assumptions.”

“Yes, yes. I should have been more careful, shouldn’t I? I could have kept this discovery to myself. Or I could have gone on wondering. I was
sure
, you see, but in my foolishness I had to have proof. I had to see if a man could live with his head cut off, against what all the medical books had told me. I had to know if it was the brain that controlled him, or if it was that parasite.”

Evelyn wondered what to ask as Barbara quieted for a moment. She knew it wasn’t necessary to ask anything. The woman was off now; she would not wind down for hours. But she felt she ought to try and guide her.

“I was wondering,” she finally ventured, “why you didn’t need a second case. A . . . a check from the other side. Why didn’t you kill a woman, too, to see if . . .” The hair stood up on the back of her neck. Of all the things she should have kept her mouth shut about, and to a homicidal paranoid! She was painfully aware of her throat. She controlled her hand, which wanted to go to her neck in feeble protection.
She has no weapons, but she could be very strong
. . .

But Barbara didn’t pick up the thought. She didn’t appear to notice Evelyn’s discomfort.

“Foolish!” she exploded. “I was foolish. Of
course
I should have taken it on faith. I felt I was right; I
knew
I was right. But the old scientific orientation finally drove me to the experiment.
Experiment
.” She spat the word out. She paused again, calming down, and seemed to think back.

“Kill a woman?” She shook her head and gave Evelyn a wry smile. “Dear, that would be murder. I’m not a killer. These ‘men’ are already dead from my viewpoint; killing them is a mercy, and a defensive act. Anyhow, after I’d done the first experiment I realized I had really proved nothing. I had only disproved the
assumption that a man cannot live with his head cut off. That left a whole range of possibilities, you see? Maybe the brain is not in the head. Maybe the brain isn’t
good
for anything. How do you know what’s inside you? Have you ever seen your brain? How do you know that you’re not really a wired-up midget, two inches tall, sitting in a control room in your head? Doesn’t it feel like that sometimes?”

“Ah . . .” Barbara had hit on a common nerve. Not the midget, which was only a fanciful way of putting it, but the concept of living in one’s head with eye-sockets as windows on the universe.

“Right. But you reject the gut feelings. I listen to them.”

The light in the room was rapidly failing. Evelyn looked at the bare bulb in the ceiling, wondering when it would come on. She was getting sleepy, so tired. But she wanted to hear more. She leaned back farther on the cot and let her legs and arms relax.

“Maybe you should . . .” she yawned, wider and wider, unable to control it. “Excuse me. Maybe you should tell me more about the parasites.”

“Ah. All right.” She went back to her chair and sat in it. Evelyn could barely see her in the shadows. She heard a faint creaking, as of wooden slats on a rocking chair. But the chair wasn’t a rocker. It wasn’t even made of wood. Nevertheless, Barbara’s shadow was moving slowly and rhythmically, and the creaking went on.

“The parasites, I’ve already told you what they do. Let me tell you what I’ve managed to deduce about their life-cycle.”

Evelyn grinned in the dark.
Life-cycle. Of course they’d have one
. She leaned on one elbow and rested her head on the wall behind her. It would be interesting.

“They reproduce asexually, like everything else. They grow by budding, since the new ones are so much smaller than the mature ones. Then doctors implant them into women’s wombs when they know they’re pregnant, and they grow up with the embryo.”

“Wait a minute,” Evelyn sat up a little straighter. “Why don’t they implant them on all children? Why are girls allowed to . . . oh, I see.”

“Yes. They need us. They can’t reproduce by themselves. They need the warmth of the womb to grow in, and we have the wombs.
So they’ve systematically oppressed the women they’ve allowed to remain uninfested so they’ll have a docile, ready supply of breeders. They’ve convinced us that we can’t have children until we’ve been impregnated, which is the biggest lie of all.”

“It is?”

“Yes. Take a look.”

Evelyn peered through the gloom and saw Barbara, standing in profile. She was illuminated by a sort of flickering candlelight. Evelyn did not wonder about it, but was bothered by a strange feeling. It was rather like wondering why she was not curious.

But before even that ephemeral feeling could concern her, Barbara loosened the cloth belt on her wrap and let it fall open. There was a gentle swell in her belly, unmistakably an early pregnancy. Her hand traced out the curve.

“See? I’m pregnant. I’m about four or five months along. I can’t say for sure, you see, because I haven’t had intercourse for over five years.”

Hysterical pregnancy
, Evelyn thought, and groped for her notebook. Why couldn’t she find it? Her hand touched it in the dark, then the pencil. She tried to write, but the pencil broke. Did it break, she wondered, or was it bending?

She heard the creaking of the floorboards again, and knew Barbara had sat down in her rocker. She looked sleepily for the source of light, but could not find it.

“What about other mammals?” Evelyn asked, with another yawn.

“Uh-huh. The same. I don’t know if it’s only one sort of parasite which is adaptable to any species of mammal, or if there’s one breed for each. But there are no males. Nowhere. Only females, and infested females.”