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Picnic on Paradise
Picnic on Paradise
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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
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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.
Copyright ©, 1968, by Joanna Russ
An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in U.S.A.
SHE WAS A SOFT-SPOKEN, DARK-HAIRED, SMALL-boned woman, not even
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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."
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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
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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
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