Joanna Russ - Picnic on Paradise

VIP免费

2024-12-18 0 0 209.68KB 114 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Picnic on Paradise

v2.0

Picnic on Paradise

Joanna Russ

Hurled through time to a strange future world where unseen forces clashed in an

inexplicable war, Trans-Temporal Agent Alyx was given the job of guiding eight very

important tourists to a station of safety. Alyx seemed exactly right for the job: she

was tough, resourceful, and experienced in the hard hand-to-hand fighting of

Earth's barbaric past.

But when she found what traps and dangers she faced in this gleaming tomorrow,

even Alyx began to fear…

"The depth, humanity and craft of this novel are as rich as the situation is stark." —

Samuel R. Delany

"The yarn is a cluster of alien worlds evolving against the background of

Paradise: the harshly physical one of Alyx, the overly simplified deterministic one

of Machine, the wishful-thinking, artificial one of Gunnar. The most fascinating

thing is watching the picnickers choose what parts of the world around them they

want to believe; some learning to accept more of it as it's hammered home to

them, some learning to duck the more intolerable realities more efficiently than

before; the whole thing presented so convincingly that I really thought Miss Russ

was going to kill off her heroine. In fact, I'm still not quite sure she didn't...." —Hal

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (1 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

Clement

JOANNA RUSS was born in 1937. She writes: "I spent my childhood half in the

Bronx Zoo and half in the Botanical Gardens. I remember being enchanted with

dinosaurs, mammoths, the Planetarium, all sorts of wild empty lots around my

house (the Bronx was wilder then). I was one of the top ten Westinghouse Science

Talent Search Winners in my last year in high school—a project on fungi. Most

people's prejudice against fungi is unwarranted. I decided at the STS convention

that I would rather go on with poetry. People told me: why don't you become a

science fiction writer? I just laughed.

"In 1957 I got out of Cornell with a B.A. in English. I spent three years at Yale

Drama School (pre-Brustein) learning how to write plays. I have continued to do so,

off and on, and a couple of these have been performed, one at Yale last year. I'm

now teaching writing at Cornell, which is very like the Bronx Botanical Gardens,

only larger and less tidy."

Joanna Russ's short stories have appeared in the major science fiction magazines,

as well as in literary magazines. PICNIC ON PARADISE is her first novel.

Printed in U.S.A.

SHE WAS A SOFT-SPOKEN, DARK-HAIRED, SMALL-boned woman, not even

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (2 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

coming up to their shoulders, like a kind of dwarf or miniature—but that was

normal enough for a Mediterranean Greek of nearly four millennia ago, before

super-diets and hybridization from seventy colonized planets had turned all

humanity (so she had been told) into Scandinavian giants. The young lieutenant,

who was two meters and a third tall, or three heads more than herself, very

handsome and ebony-skinned, said "I'm sorry, ma'am, but I cannot believe you're

the proper Trans-Temporal Agent; I think—" and he finished his thought on the

floor, his head under one of his ankles and this slight young woman (or was she

young? Trans-Temp did such strange things sometimes!) somehow holding him

down in a position he could not get out of without hurting himself to excruciation.

She let him go. She sat down on the balloon-inflated thing they provided for sitting

on in these strange times, looking curiously at the super-men and super-women,

and said, "I am the Agent. My name is Alyx," and smiled. She was in a rather good

humor. It still amused her to watch this whole place, the transparent columns the

women wore instead of clothing, the parts of the walls that pulsated in and out and

changed color, the strange floor that waved like grass, the three-dimensional

vortices that kept springing to life on what would have been the ceiling if it had only

stayed in one place (but it never did) and the general air of unhappy, dogged,

insistent, sad restlessness. "A little bit of home," the lieutenant had called it. He had

seemed to find particular cause for nostalgia in a lime-green coil that sprang out of

the floor whenever anybody dropped anything, to eat it up, but it was "not in proper

order" and sometimes you had to fight it for something you wanted to keep. The

people moved her a little closer to laughter. One of them leaned toward her now.

"Pardon me," said this one effusively—it was one of the ladies—"but is that face

yours? I've heard Trans-Temp does all sorts of cosmetic work and I thought they

might—"

"Why yes," said Alyx, hoping against hope to be impolite. "Are those breasts yours?

I can't help noticing—"

"Not at all!" cried the lady happily. "Aren't they wonderful? They're Adrian's. I mean

they're by Adrian."

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (3 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

"I think that's enough," said the lieutenant.

"Only we rather wondered" said the lady, elevating her indigo brows at what she

seemed to have taken as an insult, "why you keep yourself so covered up. Is it a

tribal rite? Are you deformed? Why don't you get cosmetic treatment; you could

have asked for it, you know, I mean I think you could—" but here everybody went

pale and turned aside, just as if she had finally managed to do something offensive

and All I did, she thought, was take off my shift.

One of the nuns fell to praying.

"All right, Agent," said the lieutenant, his voice a bare whisper, "we believe you.

Please put on your clothes.

"Please, Agent," he said again, as if his voice were failing him, but she did not move,

only sat naked and cross-legged with the old scars on her ribs and belly showing in a

perfectly natural and expectable way, sat and looked at them one by one: the two

nuns, the lady, the young girl with her mouth hanging open and the iridescent beads

wound through three feet of hair; the bald-headed boy with some contraption

strapped down over his ears, eyes and nose, the artist and the middle-aged political

man, whose right cheek had begun to jump. The artist was leaning forward with his

hand cupped under one eye in the old-fashioned and nearly unbelievable pose of

someone who has just misplaced a contact lens. He blinked and looked up at her

through a flood of mechanical tears.

"The lieutenant," he said, coughing a little, "is thinking of anaesthetics and the lady

of surgery—I really think you had better put your clothes back on, by the way—and

as to what the others think I'm not so sure. I myself have only had my usual trouble

with these damned things and I don't really mind—"

"Please, Agent," said the young officer. "But I don't think," said the artist, massaging

one eye, "that you quite understand the effect you're creating."

"None of you has anything on," said Alyx. "You have on your history," said the

artist, "and we're not used to that, believe me. Not to history. Not to old she-wolves

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (4 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

with livid marks running up their ribs and arms, and not to the idea of fights in

which people are neither painlessly killed nor painlessly fixed up but linger on and

die—slowly—or heal—slowly.

"Well!" he added, in a very curious tone of voice, "after all, we may all look like that

before this is over."

"Buddha, no!" gasped a nun.

Alyx put her clothes on, tying the black belt around the black dress. "You may not

look as bad," she said a bit sourly. "But you will certainly smell worse.

"And I," she added conversationally, "don't like pieces of plastic in people's teeth. I

think it disgusting."

"Refined sugar," said the officer. "One of our minor vices," and then, with an

amazed expression, he burst into tears.

"Well, well," muttered the young girl, "we'd better get on with it."

"Yes," said the middle-aged man, laughing nervously, 'People for Every Need,' you

know," and before he could be thoroughly rebuked for quoting the blazon of the

Trans-Temporal Military Authority (Alyx heard the older woman begin lecturing

him on the nastiness of calling anyone even by insinuation a thing, an agency, a

means or an instrument, anything but a People, or as she said "a People People") he

began to lead the file toward the door, with the girl coming next, a green tube in the

middle of her mouth, the two nuns clinging together in shock, the bald-headed boy

swaying a little as he walked, as if to unheard music, the lieutenant and the artist—

who lingered.

"Where'd they pick you up?" he said, blinking again and fingering one eye.

"Off Tyre," said Alyx. "Where'd they pick you up?"

"We," said the artist, "are rich tourists. Can you believe it? Or refugees, rather.

Caught up in a local war. A war on the surface of a planet, mind you; I don't believe

I've heard of that in my lifetime."

"I have," said Alyx, "quite a few times," and with the lightest of light pushes she

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (5 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

guided him toward the thing that passed for a decent door, the kind of thing she had

run through, roaring with laughter, time after time at her first day at Trans-Temp,

just for the pleasure of seeing it open up like a giant mouth and then pucker shut in

an enormous expression of disgust.

"Babies!" she said.

"By the way," called back the artist, "I'm a flat-color man. What was your

profession?"

"Murderer," said Alyx, and she stepped through the door.

"Raydos is the flat-color man," said the lieutenant, his feet up on what looked

gratifyingly like a table. "Used to do wraparounds and walk-ins—very good walk-ins,

too, I have a little education in that line myself—but he's gone wild about something

called pigment on flats. Says the other stuff's too easy."

"Flats whats?" said Alyx.

"I don't know, any flat surface, I suppose," said the lieutenant. "And he's got those

machines in his eyes which keep coming out, but he won't get retinotherapy. Says he

likes having two kinds of vision. Most of us are born myopic nowadays, you know."

"I wasn't," said Alyx.

"Iris," the lieutenant went on, palming something and then holding it to his ear, "is

pretty typical, though: young, pretty stable, ditto the older woman—oh yes, her

name's Maudey—and Gavrily's a conamon, of course."

"Conamon?" said Alyx, with some difficulty.

"Influence," said the lieutenant, his face darkening a little. "Influence, you know. I

don't like the man. That's too personal an evaluation, of course, but damn it, I'm a

decent man. If I don't like him, I say I don't like him. He'd honor me for it."

"Wouldn't he kick your teeth in?" said Alyx.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (6 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

"How much did they teach you at Trans-Temp?" said the lieutenant, after a pause.

"Not much," said Alyx.

"Well, anyway," said the lieutenant, a little desperately, "you've got Gavrily and he's

a conamon, then Maudey—the one with the blue eyebrows, you know—"

"Dyed?" asked Alyx politely.

"Of course. Permanently. And the wienie—"

"Well, well!" said Alyx.

"You know," said the lieutenant, with sarcastic restraint, "you can't drink that stuff

like wine. It's distilled. Do you know what distilled means?"

"Yes," said Alyx. "I found out the hard way."

"All right," said the lieutenant, jumping to his feet, "all right! A wienie is a wienie.

He's the one with the bald head. He calls himself Machine because he's an idiotic

adolescent rebel and he wears that—that Trivia on his head to give himself twenty-

four hours a day of solid nirvana, station NOTHING, turns off all stimuli when you

want it to, operates psionically. We call it a Trivia because that's what it is and

because forty years ago it was a Tri-V and I despise bald young inexistential rebels

who refuse to relate!"

"Well, well," she said again.

"And the nuns," he said, "are nuns, whatever that means to you. It means nothing to

me; I am not a religious man. You have got to get them from here to there, 'across

the border' as they used to say, because they had money and they came to see

Paradise and Paradise turned into—" He stopped and turned to her.

"You know all this," he said accusingly.

She shook her head.

"Trans-Temp—"

"Told me nothing."

"Well," said the lieutenant, "perhaps it's best. Perhaps it's best. What we need is a

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (7 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

person who knows nothing. Perhaps that's exactly what we need."

"Shall I go home?" said Alyx.

"Wait," he said harshly, "and don't joke with me. Paradise is the world you're on. It's

in the middle of a commercial war. I said commercial war; I'm military and I have

nothing to do here except get killed trying to make sure the civilians are out of the

way. That's what you're for. You get them" (he pressed something in the wall and it

turned into a map; she recognized it instantly, even though there were no sea-

monsters and no four winds puffing at the corners, which was rather a loss) "from

here to here," he said. "B is a neutral base. They can get you off-planet."

"Is that all?"

"No, that's not all. Listen to me. If you want to exterminate a world, you blanket it

with hell-bombs and for the next few weeks you've got a beautiful incandescent disk

in the sky, very ornamental and very dead, and that's that. And if you want to strip-

mine, you use something a little less deadly and four weeks later you go down in

heavy shielding and dig up any damn thing you like, and that's that. And if you want

to colonize, we have something that kills every form of animal and plant life on the

planet and then you go down and cart off the local flora and fauna if they're

poisonous or use them as mulch if they're usable. But you can't do any of that on

Paradise."

She took another drink. She was not drunk.

"There is," he said, "every reason not to exterminate Paradise. There is every reason

to keep her just as she is. The air and the gravity are near perfect, but you can't farm

Paradise."

"Why not?" said Alyx.

"Why not?" said he. "Because it's all up and down and nothing, that's why. It's

glaciers and mountains and coral reefs; it's rainbows of inedible fish in continental

slopes; it's deserts, cacti, waterfalls going nowhere, rivers that end in lakes of mud

and skies—and sunsets—and that's all it is. That's all." He sat down.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (8 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

"Paradise," he said, "is impossible to colonize, but it's still too valuable to mess up.

It's too beautiful." He took a deep breath. "It happens," he said, "to be a tourist

resort."

Alyx began to giggle. She put her hand in front of her mouth but only giggled the

more; then she let go and hoorawed, snorting derisively, bellowing, weeping with

laughter.

"That," said the lieutenant stiffly, "is pretty ghastly." She said she was sorry.

"I don't know," he said, rising formally, "just what they are going to fight this war

with. Sound on the buildings, probably; they're not worth much; and for the people

every nasty form of explosive or neuronic hand-weapon that's ever been devised.

But no radiation. No viruses. No heat. Nothing to mess up the landscape or the

ecological balance. Only they've got a net stretched around the planet that monitors

everything up and down the electromagnetic spectrum. Automatically, each

millisecond. If you went out in those mountains, young woman, and merely

sharpened your knife on a rock, the sparks would bring a radio homer in on you in

fifteen seconds. No, less."

"Thank you for telling me," said she, elevating her eyebrows.

"No fires," he said, "no weapons, no transporation, no automatic heating, no food

processing, nothing airborne. They'll have some infra red from you but they'll

probably think you're local wildlife. But by the way, if you hear anything or see

anything overhead, we think the best thing for all of you would be to get down on all

fours and pretend to be yaks. I'm not fooling."

"Poseidon!" said she, under her breath.

"Oh, one other thing," he said. "We can't have induction currents, you know. Might

happen. You'll have to give up everything metal. The knife, please."

She handed it over, thinking If I don't get that back—

"Trans-Temp sent a synthetic substitute, of course," the lieutenant went on briskly.

"And crossbows—same stuff—and packs, and we'll give you all the irradiated food

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (9 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

Picnic on Paradise

we can get you. And insulated suits."

"And ignorance," said she. His eyebrows went up.

"Sheer ignorance," she repeated. "The most valuable commodity of all. Me. No

familiarity with mechanical transportation or the whatchamacallits. Stupid. Can't

read. Used to walking. Never used a compass in my life. Right?"

"Your skill—" he began.

From each of her low sandals she drew out what had looked like part of the

ornamentation and flipped both knives expertly at the map on the wall—both

hands, simultaneously—striking precisely at point A and point B.

"You can have those, too," she said.

The lieutenant bowed. He pressed the wall again. The knives hung in a cloudy swirl,

then in nothing, clear as air, while outside appeared the frosty blue sky, the snowy

foothills drawing up to the long, easy swelling crests of Paradise's oldest mountain

chain—old and easy, not like some of the others, and most unluckily, only two

thousand meters high.

"By God!" said Alyx, fascinated, "I don't believe I've ever seen snow before."

There was a sound behind her, and she turned. The lieutenant had fainted.

They weren't right. She had palmed them a hundred times, flipped them, tested

their balance, and they weren't right. Her aim was off. They felt soapy. She

complained to the lieutenant, who said you couldn't expect exactly the same

densities in synthetics, and sat shivering in her insulated suit in the shed, nodding

now and again at the workers assembling their packs, while the lieutenant appeared

and disappeared into the walls, a little frantically. "Those are just androids," said

Iris good-humoredly. "Don't nod to them. Don't you think it's fun?"

"Go cut your hair," said Alyx.

Iris's eyes widened.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Joanna%20Russ%20-%20Picnic%20on%20Paradise.html (10 of 114)23-12-2006 0:25:15

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

PicniconParadisev2.0PicniconParadiseJoannaRussHurledthroughtimetoastrangefutureworldwhereunseenforcesclashedinaninexplicablewar,Trans-TemporalAgentAlyxwasgiventhejobofguidingeightveryimportanttouriststoastationofsafety.Alyxseemedexactlyrightfor hejob:shewastough,resourceful,andexperiencedinthehar...

展开>> 收起<<

Joanna Russ - Picnic on Paradise.pdf

共114页,预览23页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Joanna Russ - Picnic on Paradise

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: