The Universe of Things
The Universe of Things
Short Fiction
by
Gwyneth Jones
Aqueduct Press
PO Box 95787
Seattle wa 99145-2787
www.aqueductpress.com
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The Universe of Things
Print Copyright © 2011 by Gwyneth Jones
Digital Copyright © 2011 by Gwyneth Jones
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Digital ISBN: 978-1-933500-65-2
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Cover: Microcosm poster "The History of the Universe"
by permission of CERN, Geneva 23, Switzerland.
CERN-DI-9108002 ©CERN Geneva
Book Design by Kathryn Wilham
Acknowledgements
original publication list
“In The Forest Of The Queen,” Eclipse (1) 2007; ed Jonathan Strahan, Nightshade Books USA
“Total Internal Reflection,” Nature 403, 707 (17th Feb 2000)
“Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland,” Off Limits: Tales of Alien Sex, ed Ellen Datlow, Ace Books, NY, April 1997
“The Universe of Things,” New Worlds 3, ed David Garnett, Gollancz, London, 1993
“Blue Clay Blues,” Interzone, UK, Aug 1992
“Grazing The Long Acre,” Interzone, UK, January 1998
“Collision,” When It Changed, ed Geoff Ryman, Comma Press, Manchester, September 2009
“One Of Sandy’s Dreams,” The Drabble Project, eds Meades & Wake, Beccon Publications, UK April 1988
“Gravegoods,” Interzone, UK Sept/Oct 1989
“La Cenerentola,” Interzone, UK, Oct 1998
“Grandmother’s Footsteps,” Walls of Fear, ed Kathryn Cramer, William Morrow & Co. NY, Sept 1990
“The Earlier Crossing,” The Last Minute Book: A Bumper Anthology of East Sussex Writing, ed Richard Crane, University of Sussex, 1995
“The Eastern Succession,” IASFM, Feb 1988
“The Princess, the Thief and the Cartesian Circle,” Crank! 1, ed Bryan Cholfin, Broken Mirrors Press, NY, 1993
“Identifying The Object,” Interzone, UK, Dec 1990 as "Forward Echoes"
Table of Contents
Introduction by Steven Shaviro
In the Forest of the Queen
Total Internal Reflection
Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland
The Universe of Things
Blue Clay Blues
Grazing the Long Acre
Collision
One of Sandy’s Dreams
Gravegoods
La Cenerentola
Grandmother’s Footsteps
The Early Crossing
The Eastern Succession
The Thief, the Princess, and the Cartesian Circle
Identifying the Object
Introduction
by Steven Shaviro
In “The Universe of Things,” the title story of this collection, an auto mechanic has an encounter with an alien. This is not, in itself, an extraordinary occurrence. For in the story, the open presence of aliens on Earth is a given. “The Universe of Things” is set in the space of Gwyneth Jones’s “Aleutian” trilogy — a series of novels exploring a near-future Earth that is visited, colonized, and ultimately abandoned by an alien humanoid race whose technologies are superior to our own. The Aleutian novels and stories trace a history of prolonged alien contact. The presence of these strangers is traumatic and disturbing; and yet, through its long duration, it comes to be woven into the habits and assumptions of everyday human life. So there is nothing especially startling about the fact that, one day, an alien comes to the auto mechanic to get its vehicle fixed. (I said “its,” but I just as well might have said “her” — the uncertainty of gender pronouns, when it comes to the aliens, is itself an important feature of the world that Jones presents to us.) An alien’s visit to an auto repair shop is not something that happens every day. But in the world of the story, it is well within the bounds of possibility. When the alien enters the shop, we see the human customers “pretending, in their English way, that nothing special had happened.” The mechanic himself tries to pretend. He struggles to give the appearance of treating the alien just has he would any other customer. But really, he is both excited and flustered by being visited by one of “them.” The story tracks the mechanic’s changing reactions, both to the alien itself, and to the culture and technics of the alien’s civilization.
Not all the stories in this volume are set in the Aleutian universe. But they all deal, in one way or another, with experiences of difference. There are differences in gender and culture, in age and social class; there are differences in habits, in basic assumptions, and in forms of life. There are differences in technological ability and access, as well. These differences constitute both a barrier and an opportunity. They always need to be negotiated, in one way or another. The real subject of Jones’s fiction — as of much science fiction — is precisely the negotiation of such differences. In Jones’s fiction, this is never easy. Her novels and stories never portray an unambiguous, genocidal struggle to the death, in the manner of War of the Worlds or Starship Troopers. But they also never give us the cozy multicultural “We-Are-the-World” benevolence of anything like Star Trek’s Federation of Planets. Instead, Jones’s novels and stories cover the uncomfortable ground of the in between. Hers is a world of compromises, second choices, ambivalent responses, and unintended betrayals.
The stories in this volume range from the mundane (a young woman hitchhiking in post-Communist Eastern Europe, in “Grazing the Long Acre”) to the horrific (“Grandmother’s Footsteps,” a kind of revisionist haunted house story), passing through fable (“The Thief, The Princess, and the Cartesian Circle”), fantasy (“The Eastern Succession”), and post-apocalyptic science fiction (“Blue Clay Blues”). But for all their range, Jones’s stories always convey a sense of differences that are ultimately irreconcilable. Competing interests and divergences in outlook cannot be wished away; they cannot be neatly reduced to some common denominator; they cannot be narrated to a satisfying conclusion. What’s more, Jones forces us to be aware of power differentials; when genders or cultures or habits or philosophies come into conflict, they never do so on an even playing field. “Any interaction with another person involves some kind of jockeying for power, dickering over control” (“Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland”).
In all these stories, the characters are forced into some sort of accommodation. But they are also left with the lingering sense that this accommodation is unjust and unsatisfying. Every accomplishment also marks a failure — because we remain oppressively aware that we could have done better. As a feminist writer, Jones refuses to accept compromises that leave gender inequities in place — even as she recounts the stories of such compromises and recognizes how they may well have staved off something worse. And as a science fiction writer, Jones shows deep awareness of how provisional, and fragile, all our acceptances and reconciliations can be, for there are always new potentials, new cultural or technological disruptions in the offing. Jones envisions a future that is different enough from the present that we are forced to recognize the contingency — and changeability —of the things we take most for granted. This future is resolutely non-utopian. Gender and class oppressions persist beyond all reason — just as they do in our supposedly enlightened, liberal present.
In “The Universe of Things,” the auto mechanic is both intrigued and frightened by the differences that the alien and i
ts culture bring to him. These differences are all the more perturbing, in that they come in the course of a routine, everyday encounter: the request to repair a bit of earth-standard technology. The mechanic fixes automobiles; he retains a certain “mystique of craftsmanship” about his work, despite the fact that nearly all this work is done automatically, by machines. These machines make him feel redundant, just as the presence of the aliens somehow makes him feel redundant. In any case, the mechanic does not quite know how to treat the alien. He is both fascinated by it and embarrassed by his own fascination. He wants to treat it the same as everyone else, and he wants to give it special treatment. He covets its presence, and he is also a bit frightened by it. He wants it to stay forever, and he wants it to go away. All these attitudes make him feel vaguely guilty, since he knows that he is not treating the alien, face to face, in the way that he would treat any other sentient, living person.
The mechanic feels confused and ashamed, when faced with the alien’s request for technological assistance. This is not just because the aliens’ own technology is superior to Earth technology. It is also because of the way that the alien technology is so different. Our own technology, no matter how powerful, is mechanistic and reductive. We cannot help feeling that it is dead, where we are alive. The aliens’ technology, on the other hand, is itself alive, both literally and figuratively. The aliens’ tools are biological extrusions of themselves: “they had tools that crept, slithered, flew, but they had made these things… They built things with bacteria… Bacteria which were themselves traceable to the aliens’ own intestinal flora, infecting everything.” In consequence, “the aliens could not experience being a-part. There were no parts in their continuum: no spaces, no dividing edges.” They are alive in the midst of an entirely “living world.” We, to the contrary, cannot escape our Cartesian legacy: the feeling that we are alone in our aliveness, trapped in a world of dead, or merely passive, matter.
The story’s climax comes when the mechanic decides to turn off the automated machines and repair the alien’s car as a craftsman would: by himself, with his own tools. He has an epiphany — or an hallucination. He experiences, for a moment, what the aliens’ “living world” is like: “He stared at the spanner in his hand until the rod of metal lost its shine. Skin crept over it; the adjustable socket became a cup of muscle, pursed like an anus, wet lips drawn back by a twist on the tumescent rod.” When the world comes alive, it becomes obscene and pornographic. Existence is suffocating and unbearable. Everything is suffused by “living slime…full of self, of human substance.” This is what happens when you have “succeeded in entering the alien mind, seen the world through alien eyes.” The mechanic is terrified and nauseated; all he wants is to return to the security of the human world, a world in which objects are mere things, safely distant from us, entirely dead.
“The Universe of Things” is a parable of sorts, although its final import remains ambiguous. Is the story a lament for the failures and limitations of the human imagination, unable to transcend its parochial point of view? Is it a warning against the hubris of masculine presumption, maintaining its own control at the price of murdering the outside world, reducing it to a meaningless agglomeration of inert, lifeless matter? (The “outside world” here could also be read as a male projection of the “feminine.”) Does the alien vision suggest a way of living otherwise? Is the experience of a vital, animated world something that we might embrace, instead of fleeing it in revulsion and horror? The mechanic remembers his experience as an encounter with “an inimical Eden: a treasure that he could no more enjoy than he could crawl back into the womb.” But must this Eden remain inimical, and must we understand it in such tellingly gendered terms? Jones does not give us the answers to any of these questions. She leaves us in doubt, and perhaps also in wonder.
In the Forest of the Queen
To Aymon Bock the Montsec American Monument seemed inflated: a Doughboys’ monster donut, dominating a landscape that really didn’t need any more reminders of war and death. Surely the hectares of white crosses, another thick-sown field of them every time you turned a bend, were sufficient? The only way to escape the thing was to drive up there, which Aymon and his wife Viola duly did. They left the car, climbed a momentous flight of steps, and walked around the circuit of massive fluted columns. Built in 1930, damaged in WWII, restored in 1948.
“Designed by Egerton Swartwout,” remarked Viola. “Sounds like a German name, and it looks like Nazi architecture; isn’t that ironic.”
“The Doughboys didn’t fight Nazis. They were here in 1918; they fought one of the last great battles of the Great War, down there below —”
Viola sighed and nodded. She knew all about the Doughboys of the American Expeditionary Force, their gallant part in licking Kaiser Bill, the various rationales suggested for that nickname (the dumpling shape of an Infantryman’s buttons, the dust of battle, a derogatory reference to apprentice bakers’ boys…). The Doughboys were the reason, or one of the reasons, for this pilgrimage to northeastern France.
The only other visitor was a stooped young man in mis-matched tweed jacket and tan chinos, laden with camera equipment, who did not have kin remembered here; he was just interested in the AEF. So Aymon was in his element: pointing out his great-grandfather’s name, explaining the strategic importance of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, General John J. Pershing’s objectives, the difficulties that beset the American boys in their biggest operation on French soil — and Viola was released to gaze in peace at the landscape of what had been the “St. Mihiel Salient.” The wooded ridges, the lush green, lake-dotted plain, the tide of forest lapping at its shore.
Aymon remembered that his penchant for talking to strangers tended to get him into trouble with Viola, and he wanted her on his side, today of all days. He bid the young man from Kentucky a courteous goodbye, before he’d even scratched the surface of his knowledge, and came to join her.
“It looks so peaceful now.”
“Did you know,” said Viola, “this is still one of the most sparsely populated areas in Europe? Right here, practically next door to Paris, and all those big, packed, developed cities? It’s a boneyard, a graveyard, a derelict munitions dump. I warned you. Didn’t I warn you? The eastern flank of La Belle France is just battlefield after battlefield. Who’d want to come here, work here? How do you plan to attract the good people?”
“Money,” said Aymon. “Space, freedom, natural beauty. You’re so wrong: this location is perfect. We’ll be fighting them off with sticks —”
Aymon Bock was an extremely wealthy man. He’d been loaded before he was thirty, avoided getting his fingers burned in a long career of daring start-ups; and finally, in what he still felt was youthful middle age, he wanted to give something back. He looked on the grinning slackers who were this generation’s overnight billionaires, not with envy but with trepidation, and felt his long-ago hippie roots stirring. He meant to do something good, and since this region of France was (according to family legend) his ancestral home, he had chosen the forests of Argonne for the site of his Foundation. Having a French son-in-law also helped; though Jean-Raoul had been almost as hard to convince as Viola herself.
“There’s another Great War going on, Vi. The world’s in crisis; don’t you understand that? The Bock Foundation is going to be a beacon in the storm: here, where my people came from. I’m the one to do it, I know I am. I have the experience, the talent for spotting ventures that will fly, and for hiring the guys, the scientists, the technologists, who are really going places. I’m tired of all the defeatism, the denial and plain lies. It’s time to get organized, pull together, and see this Global Warming, Climate Change bogey for what it is: a dazzling opportunity. A new industrial revolution.”
“You’re such a romantic. If you want to be a war hero like your great-grand daddy was, why don’t you set up a Sustainable Technology Center in the Sudan? Or closer to home, in Down South, Black Hispanic USA, the newest Desperate Developing Nation on th
e block?”
“I give a heap of money away to good causes, Vi. You know I do. But it’s pouring water in a bucket full of holes: and you know that too. A man like me, with my expertise, is better employed turning out new buckets.”
“Those Developing Nations,” remarked Viola, heading for the steps, “can be such a hassle to deal with. Where there’s human suffering, there’s dirty politics. Business dies, and God forbid Aymon Bock should get his fingers burned at last.”
“I’m doing this for you, too. It’s going to reboot your career. You’re going to design for me.”
“Now you’re talking crazy. Designers have to be cool, and middle-aged women are not cool. Only youth is cool, in a woman.”
“That’s ridiculous! That’s antediluvian thinking; this is the Age of the Grey Cougars. What about Vivienne Westwood?”
“She’s in fashion and she’s pushing seventy. Thanks a lot.”
“Hell, did I say the Bock Foundation? I misspoke myself. It’s going to be the Viola Canning Bock Foundation.”
Viola laughed, touched in spite of herself. Say what you like about Aymon Bock, he could do irony: he could laugh at himself. She took a vintage Hermès scarf from her $6,000 shoulder bag and tied it over her hair, Grace Kelly style. He liked to drive the gun-metal Aston Martin he’d chosen for this trip with the top down and the wind in his golf-tan wrinkles.
Of course he did.
She was a disappointment to her husband because she’d taken a career break, long ago, and never gotten around to mending it. She couldn’t convince him that it would be madness for her to return to the fray: a wealthy woman, playing with her husband’s newest toy. She’d be a laughing stock. But Ay’s own “career” was in the same state. The money produced itself now, without Aymon’s assistance: churning out mounds and mounds of cash, like that infernal salt mill in the fairytale. The money-maker and his wife were over. They were on the down slope, and this eco-technology fantasy just proved it.