A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories Read Free Page A

can’t see how and why the true
     belief isn’t working. Like Dalzul in “Dancing to Ganam,” Ike is a tragic character, an admirable overreacher, but he’s less
     resolute and more honest than Dalzul, and so suffers more. He is also an exile; almost all my heroes have been in one way
     or another exiles.
    Some reviewers have dismissed Ike as a feeble strawdog, victim of my notorious bloodthirsty man-hating feminist spleen. Have
     it your way, fellows, if you like it. Fried spleen with backlash sauce? But however the reader may see Ike, I hope the story
     doesn’t read as anti-space travel. I love both the idea and the reality of the exploration of space, and was only trying to
     make the whole idea less smugly antiseptic. I really do think we have to take our dirt with us wherever we go. We are dirt.
     We are Earth.

T HE F IRST C ONTACT W ITH THE G ORGONIDS
    Mrs. Jerry Debree, the heroine of Grong Crossing, liked to look pretty. It was important to Jerry in his business contacts,
     of course, and also it made her feel more confident and kind of happy to know that her cellophane was recent and her eyelashes
     really well glued on and that the highlighter blush was bringing out her cheekbones like the nice girl at the counter had
     said. But it was beginning to be hard to feel fresh and look pretty as this desert kept getting hotter and hotter and redder
     and redder until it looked, really, almost like what she had always thought the Bad Place would look like, only not so many
     people. In fact none.
    “Could we have passed it, do you think?” she ventured at last, and received without surprise the exasperation she had safety-valved
     from him: “How the fuck could we have
passed
it when we haven’t
passed
one fucking
thing
except those fucking
bushes
for ninety miles?
Christ
you’re dumb.”
    Jerry’s language was a pity. And sometimes it made it so hard to talk to him. She had had the least little tiny sort of feeling,
     woman’s intuition maybe, that the men that had told him how to get to Grong Crossing were teasing him, having a little joke.
     He had been talking so loud in the hotel bar about how disappointed he hadbeen with the Corroboree after flying all the way out from Adelaide to see it. He kept comparing it to the Indian dance they
     had seen at Taos. Actually he had been very bored and restless at Taos and they had had to leave in the middle so he could
     have a drink and she never had got to see the people with the masks come, but now he talked about how they really knew how
     to put on a native show in the U.S.A. He said a few scruffy abos jumping around weren’t going to give tourists from the real
     world anything to write home about. The Aussies ought to visit Disney World and find out how to do the real thing, he said.
    She agreed with that; she loved Disney World. It was the only thing in Florida, where they had to live now that Jerry was
     ACEO, that she liked much. One of the Australian men at the bar had seen Disneyland and agreed that it was amazing, or maybe
     he meant amusing; what he said was amizing. He seemed to be a nice man. Bruce, he said his name was, and his friend’s name
     was Bruce too. “Common sort of name here,” he said, only he said name, but he meant name, she was quite sure. When Jerry went
     on complaining about the Corroboree, the first Bruce said, “Well, mite, you might go out to Grong Crossing, if you really
     want to see the real thing—right, Bruce?”
    At first the other Bruce didn’t seem to know what he meant, and that was when her woman’s intuition woke up. But pretty soon
     both Bruces were talking away about this place, Grong Crossing, way out in “the bush,” where they were certain to meet real
     abos really living in the desert. “Near Alice Springs,” Jerry said knowledgeably, but it wasn’t, they said; it was still farther
     west from here. They gave directions so precisely that it was clear they knew what they were talking about. “Few