Puss in D.C. and Other Stories Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION, by Eleanor Arnason

  PUSS IN D.C.

  STRAWBERRY BIRDIES

  AFTER I STOPPED SCREAMING

  THE ROTATOR

  THE FALLING

  STRIP-RUNNER

  A SMALLER GOVERNMENT

  NOT ALONE

  THE DROWNED FATHER

  THE TRUE DARKNESS

  ABOUT PAMELA SARGENT

  ALSO BY PAMELA SARGENT

  ABOUT ELEANOR ARNASON

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2015 by Pamela Sargent

  Published by Wildside Press LLC.

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  “Introduction” is published here for the first time. Copyright © 2015 by Eleanor Arnason.

  The Afterwords to each story are published here for the first time. Copyright © 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “Puss in D.C.” was first published in Little Red Riding Hood in the Big Bad City, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers, DAW Books, 2004. Copyright © 2004, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “Strawberry Birdies” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2011. Copyright © 2011, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “After I Stopped Screaming” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November, 2006. Copyright © 2006, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “The Rotator” was first published in Future Americas, edited by John Helfers and Martin H. Greenberg, DAW Books, 2008. Copyright © 2008, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “The Falling” was first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1983. Copyright © 1983, 2015 by Pamela Sargent and George Zebrowski.

  “Strip-Runner” was first published in Foundation’s Friends, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Tor Books, 1990. Copyright 1990, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “A Smaller Government” was first published in Fast Forward 1: Science Fiction from the Cutting Edge, edited by Lou Anders, Pyr Books, 2007. Copyright © 2007, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “Not Alone” was first published in Cosmos, August/September 2006. Copyright © 2006, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “The Drowned Father” was first published in Polyphony 6, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, Wheatland Press, 2006. Copyright © 2006, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  “The True Darkness” was first published in World Literature Today, May/June 2010, http://www.ou.edu/worldlit/onlinemagazine/2010may/sargent.html. Copyright © 2010 World Literature Today and Board of Regents, University of Oklahoma; copyright reverted to the author in 2012. Copyright © 2012, 2015 by Pamela Sargent.

  The above stories are reprinted here by permission of the author and her agents, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., 200 East 72nd St., New York, NY 10021.

  DEDICATION

  To the memory of Magda Cordell McHale,

  artist, mentor, and friend

  INTRODUCTION, by Eleanor Arnason

  I first encountered Pamela Sargent in 1975, when she published Women of Wonder, an anthology of science fiction by women As far as I know, it was the first such anthology. The book was hugely important to me, at the time a fairly young, barely published woman writer, trying to make my way in a field that was utterly dominated by men. Two more anthologies followed: More Women of Wonder (1976) and New Women of Wonder (1978). One of my stories was in the last.

  I became aware of her fiction later. I can’t remember the first stories I read. The novels that have stayed with me are her Venus trilogy, about the terraforming of Venus, a far more difficult planet to change than Mars. (Venus of Dreams [1986], Venus of Shadows [1988] and Child of Venus [2001]). The novels give us a slow, thorough portrait of an almost impossible project. I pair it in my mind with Kim Stanley Robinson’s famous Mars trilogy, though—because Venus is so very hard to terraform—it’s more amazing. Science fiction does not always have to think big, but I really enjoy SF when it does. I also like Ruler of the Sky, a historical novel about Genghis Khan (1993), which begins with a traditional tribal bride stealing and ends with the horrific conquest of much of Asia. The arc is smooth. We can see one act of violence leading to another, until cities and countries are destroyed. And I like Climb the Wind (1998), an alternative history that imagines a leader like Genghis uniting the plains Indians during the mid nineteenth century and stopping the westward expansion of white America.

  I have to mention “Danny Goes to Mars,” a 1992 story that won the Nebula Award. It’s about Dan Quayle, who may have been the most ignorant American vice-president ever. He is famous for saying that Mars—as it is now—is habitable. So Sargent wrote a funny, sweet, sad story about Quayle going to Mars, which is—of course—uninhabitable.

  You can see some of Sargent’s range: classic hard SF, political SF, social SF, satire, fiction about history and alternative history. This is a wide range and not at all usual. Most good writers of hard SF don’t write well about social issues, and most good writers of social and political SF are weak on the hard sciences.

  (In case you are wondering, the hard sciences are physics, chemistry, engineering and maybe biology, though biology is considered to be a bit soft and squishy. Sociology, anthropology, political science and history are not hard sciences, and fiction about them is not hard SF. Don’t blame me for these definitions. I didn’t make them up.)

  Sargent has a quality usually associated with hard SF: a certain kind of intellectual rigor. With her, it carries through all of her work. She thinks things through.

  Notice, when you read this collection, how many different kinds of stories are here and notice the range of moods: the stories go from really funny to really dark, with a lot in between.

  I also want to mention Sargent’s persistence. Writing is a hard life. Many good woman writers I admired in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s have vanished. They stopped writing or stopped trying to sell their fiction or changed their names and moved to writing romance, gay romance, generic fantasy—whatever they could sell. In one way or another, they were silenced. Sargent has kept doing thoughtful, serious fiction, dealing with the issues that interested her.

  The longer I am around, the more I value persistence. It is an essential trait for writers.

  This brings me to the current collection. Reading the stories, I’ve been trying to define what I like about Sargent.

  I like her focus on ordinary people and ordinary life, as it is changed by something extraordinary. “Strawberry Birdies” starts with a graduate student family in the 1950s, stressed by small children and too little money, and then introduces time travelers, who are trying to change history and prevent an awful future. The viewpoint character is the family’s young daughter, trying to deal with her family and the paranoid ’50s. While the other kids on the block imagine Communist spies, she actually meets secret agents from the future.

  “The True Darkness” is made doubly disturbing by the ordinary people it describes. As far as I’m concerned, being a convinced urbanite, darkness is a fine metaphor for life in the suburbs, at least as I imagine it to be. Think of the poor woman in the story, who is dragged by her husband out into the suburbs, and then the light—all the light—goes out.

  A lot of the stories here are political, which I love: “Puss in D.C.,” “The Rotator” and “A Smaller Government.”

  Science and technology are fine, and they are a main topic of science fiction, but it’s politics that decides how science and technology are used. “The Rotator,” for example, uses new technology to move a couple of high-profile American politicians
in trouble into an alternate world, where things do not work out as planned. A better use for the technology could have been found, and the device should have been tested longer, as any engineer will tell you.

  In “A Smaller Government,” people simply accept the shrunken White House and Capitol—and diminish themselves by this acceptance, as the Homeless Philosopher points out. (I love the Homeless Philosopher and the Homeless Lobbyist.)

  I like her feminism, which shows up strongly in “After I Stopped Screaming.” Of course King Kong is looking for his real mate: a large, self-actualizing, female ape. Why on Earth would he be interested in tiny and vulnerable human women?

  “The Strip Runner” is a feminist homage to Asimov’s The Caves of Steel. As wonderful as Asimov could be, he imagined that women would live in the future the way they lived in 1950s sitcoms, trapped in the kitchen and their family. Sargent has written a fun, old-fashioned SF story, and she gives her young heroine a way out of a dreary life.

  A couple of the stories here give us a look at the utter strangeness of contemporary physics: “The Falling” and “The True Darkness.” There actually is a theory that our universe has an unstable ground state and could collapse into another reality. That’s the way I read “The Falling.” Reality has collapsed into something else that does not look friendly.

  Something equally disturbing is happening in “The True Darkness,” though I don’t know what. I suppose one way to understand these stories is to remember J.B.S. Haldane’s famous comment: “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine. It is stranger than we can imagine.” And it is not a safe place.

  “The Drowned Father” is the only story in the collection that is not science fiction or fantasy, and I like it a lot, though I am not a fan of contemporary realistic fiction. The story does have a slight SF flavor, because we know the viewpoint character is a liar and we aren’t sure that the other character—the woman—is telling the truth. So reality has been undercut.

  It’s a classic story of coming to terms with a parent—or, in this case, not coming to terms with a parent, made more interesting because the difficult parent in a fine, possibly great writer.

  I won’t say more for fear of spoiling the story.

  That’s about all I have to say. Enjoy the collection. The stories are enjoyable and easy to read. But there is also a lot in them. Notice Sargent’s range and thoughtfulness and what I have to call moral seriousness. We tend to undervalue moral seriousness nowadays. But caring about people and human decency—and the big questions of life—always has value.

  PUSS IN D.C.

  I was trained to be discreet, to keep my extraordinary abilities to myself, but still retain my dreams of public glory, of being openly acknowledged for my accomplishments. Perhaps one day, I muse to myself while grooming my fur or lying about on my favorite pillow, I’ll be able to dictate my memoirs and see them set down on paper.

  Given the stories I have to tell, there’s no question that my book could fetch a large advance from a major publishing house. I can hardly watch television lately without imagining myself matching wits with Charlie Rose, or responding to Larry King’s amiable goofball questions with answers that would shame him with my eloquence. Surely Oprah would be interested in a guest who would most likely be the first ever to sit on her lap during the interview, and if Bill O’Reilly got excessively argumentative, a snarl and a display of my front claws should be enough to calm him down. As for book signings, my pawprint on the title page ought to serve as well as an autograph.

  I would of course insist on certain amenities during the rigors of any book tour: a personal assistant to help with grooming and running errands; a comfortable carrying case with ample cushioning; shrimp and crabmeat at least once a day; bottled spring water and the occasional bowl of cream; first class seating instead of consignment to the luggage and cargo hold; and a good workout chasing mice at least two or three times a week. I dream of it all—being number one on the New York Times and Amazon lists, being offered a fat chunk of cash for the movie rights to my story and, most important, finally receiving the credit that I deserve for all I’ve done.

  Not that my life is so bad as it is, and there are certain impediments to full disclosure. There’s my knowledge of certain Agency operations, for one thing, although I would happily make an agreement not to give away any classified information. And Maury, in spite of his gratitude for everything I’ve helped him accomplish so far, probably wouldn’t want the world to know exactly how much he owes to me, especially now, with more victories assuredly lying ahead of him. There’s also the matter of my legal rights, since as a cat, I currently lack the status to sign contracts and make any binding agreements, and wouldn’t care to spend the rest of my life in court being a test case for animal rights.

  So perhaps these musings of mine should be regarded as mental notes for a memoir I’ll probably never be able to write.

  * * * *

  The Agency was where my life truly began, with Maury’s father, Charles Carabas, as my caretaker and mentor. I have no memory of my life before Mr. Carabas found me, an abandoned kitten, outside his house in Georgetown. Moved by my piteous meows and my plight, he took me in and gave me a home. As a widower who lived alone, he was grateful for my presence, since his son Maury was in law school at the time and came home only for holidays.

  Not long after Mr. Carabas had given me shelter, he discovered that I had the ability to speak when I, tiring of my usual fare, politely requested a can of tuna for supper. A lesser person might have been convinced that he had gone mad, and run to a psychiatrist; a more fearful one might have regarded me as a freak of nature and disposed of me somehow. It was my good fortune that Mr. Carabas not only welcomed a feline companion with whom he could carry on a conversation, but also enabled me, with his example, to acquire a verbal facility I might otherwise never have attained. He was an erudite man, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford and occasional lecturer in political philosophy and foreign affairs at Georgetown University. He read voraciously and spoke several languages, which is how I managed to pick up French, Spanish, German, some Japanese, and even a decent command of Arabic. Because he had been employed by the Agency for almost forty years, he had also been well schooled in secrecy and discretion, and taught me to follow his example. I concealed my conversational abilities from other human beings, even from Maury when he was home between semesters.

  Often Mr. Carabas brought me to his office at the Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia; his fellow intelligence officers tolerated this eccentricity out of their esteem for the old man. I knew how to conduct myself, was soon roaming freely from the seventh-floor offices of the chiefs down to the cubbyholes on the floors below, and quickly became a kind of mascot. Analysts, operatives, and directors welcomed me into their offices, offered me toys stuffed with catnip, fed me treats fetched from the building’s dining room, allowed me to nap on their desks or in chairs, and marveled at my ability to perch on toilet seats in the rest rooms in order to relieve myself, thus sparing anyone from having to maintain and clean a litter box for me.

  Mr. Carabas had named me Angleton, after James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence during the Agency’s glory days, and it was a more suitable moniker for me than any of his colleagues realized. As I prowled the hallways and perched on desks, I overheard a good many tidbits, and passed the tastiest of them along to my human companion. Learning how to read, which presented fewer impediments than mastering speech, also enabled me to surreptitiously peruse many a highly classified document; as a result, Mr. Carabas cemented his reputation as someone who knew all, could never be deceived, and was to be feared and respected.

  My mentor and caretaker often thought of retiring. For well over a decade and a half, the Agency had endured scandals, humiliating Congressional hearings, ruined careers, and rules that had made nearly everyone overly cautious and suspicious. Operatives who might be re
quired to support covert operations took out liability insurance, foreseeing the day when they might have to face committees of angry politicians demanding answers, along with heavy legal bills. Analysts who reported to the chief of counterterrorism sifted through their data to the point of obsessiveness, fearing that they might miss important clues and thus have to live with being responsible for the deaths of fellow citizens, deaths they might have prevented. All of them were deeply suspicious of a government that promised them support one day, yet might leave them all hanging out to dry the next.

  The atmosphere in Langley was not a healthy one, and Mr. Carabas had been warned by his doctors that stress was taking its toll on his heart. But he was a patriot, and devoted to his craft. He would do what he could for his country for as long as possible.

  I often think of the last operation he dreamed up but was never able to carry out, the one in which I would have had a crucial role to play. This was during the time a certain Middle Eastern dictator had gone from being a thorn in our side to becoming a knife aimed at our nation’s throat. Mr. Carabas, dismayed at the increasing likelihood of war—he had always regarded warfare as a massive failure of intelligence in both senses—had come up with a plan.

  He spoke of his scheme one evening when we were by ourselves. His catering service had dropped off several prepared meals for his consumption on those nights when he wasn’t out dining with friends or at Washington’s better restaurants, while the cleaning woman who came in three days a week had left late that afternoon. “I’d need your assistance, Angleton,” Mr. Carabas said to me as I dined on chopped chicken livers and he sipped brandy. “It would mean blowing your cover and risking your life, so I won’t hold it against you if you decide not to volunteer.”

  I felt my whiskers twitch. “Go on, sir,” I replied, feeling that I owed it to Mr. Carabas to hear him out.

  His plan, to put it simply, was to smuggle me into the dictator’s country with a couple of operatives who were working with that nation’s resistance movement. A fast-acting and deadly toxin would be applied to my claws, and I would be turned loose near whatever palace was currently housing the tyrant. My mission was to locate that disagreeable fellow, administer the powerful and inevitably fatal poison with a few scratches of my claws, and then make my escape.