Small Axe Books

“Anarres,” Christa said over lunch one day, “is a planet in the Tau Ceti system. Actually it’s a moon of a planet, Urras.”

Someone had made the mistake of asking Christa what she was reading. Once on a roll, Christa could talk for hours, especially if she got a chance to preach about something. The little paperback atop her ignored required reading bore the title The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. “Philosophy,” she said, “thinly disguised as science fiction.” It related a story about an anarchist society founded by exiles from Urras, a planet of many nations much like Earth.

“There was this revolution, right? All these anarchists who followed a woman called Odo. They got strong enough to threaten the governments, so the governments said to ‘em `You wanna build a new society? Fine. Go build it on the moon!’ So that’s what they did.”

Even though the moon Anarres was a desert and Urras was this lush, green planet, the Anarresti were happier because they shared everything, good and bad, and answered to no one and nothing besides their common beliefs. The Urrasti had to deal with poverty, war, and authority, the richest among them squandering their wealth while others starved.

“Kinda like this place,” she said, pointing at the tables around her. “This place is like Urras on a bad day. If we had our own place, away from all this shit, it wouldn’t matter if it were in a sewer. It would be ours together, without all this `consume or die’ bullshit these people are addicted to.”

“So how was their sex lives?” Dingo asked flatly, his eyes on his pizza, watching it lose half its mass as he sopped the grease off with a napkin.

“The Anarresti? They could do whatever they wanted. No laws. People tended to form partnerships, though.”

“Monogamous?”

“Sometimes.”

“That’s useless.” Dingo bit into his pizza and felt the rubbery cheese in his teeth more than he tasted it.

“Well maybe,” Christa said in stride. “They didn’t go into it as much as you’d probably like.”

“It sounds cool,” said a black-clad pretty boy who just started sitting at Christa’s table the week before.

Christa smiled at him, grateful for the support. “Yeah, I think so. It’s a cool book, too, because there’s trouble in paradise. Like, there’s no government on Anarres, but there’s traditions. People felt guilty about doing stuff for themselves, or having opinions that differed radically from those around them. `Egoizing’ they called it. They got so worried about egoizing that they doubted their right to question how things are. It’s easy on Urras to question things, when they’re so obviously stupid. It’s harder on Anarres. That’s kinda the `problem’ of the book.”

“Does it get resolved?” the pretty boy asked.

“Yeah,” she smiled coyly and said nothing more.

The pretty boy smiled back. “But you’re not gonna tell me or I–”

“–won’t read the book. Exactly.”

“An ideal society,” Dingo said with authority, “would be anarchist. But it would also have to have explored its feeling about sex. If ya wanna read a book, doc, ya oughtta check out Time Enough For Love.”

“Who’s that by?”

“Robert A. Heinlein. It’s philosophy thinly disguised as science fiction, too. That’s an expression Christa ripped off from me, by the way.”

“Oh bullshit, Dingo! Like I need to borrow your stupid lines!”

“Whatever. Anyway, Heinlein advocates open relationships and free love and living independent of society. He has proverbs like `Thou art god’ and `Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.’ He views jealousy as wrong and death as every one’s privilege.”

“Poor Tristan,” Nyota laughed. “We’re all converting him to our religions! As long as you’re reading books, I’ll give you some straight-edge stuff to listen to. That’ll be interesting background music for Heinlein.”

“Oh, don’t give him that!” Dingo chided, thinking of all the work he had done with Tristan in the past week since he had met him in detention. “Tristan’s asexual enough without some skinheads and Morrissey encouraging him.”

“Oh, leave him alone, Dingo. You’ve just been screwing people so long, you can’t remember how peaceful it was to be celibate.”

“Listen to you! You sound like a fuckin’ priest! Why don’tcha join a convent, Nyota? Then you could teach here.”

Everyone laughed at the thought of Nyota in one of those black veils and white habits the nuns at St. Anthony’s wore. Nyota recovered quickly.

“I wouldn’t be celibate for them!” she said in disgust. “But you have to admit they’ve got an advantage over us by clearing their minds. They’re not thinking about desires and relationships. They’re thinking about how better to control us. And you have to admit what a good job they’ve been doing.”

“Aw, they have sex,” Christa scoffed. “Half of ‘em with boyfriends on the outside, half of ‘em with each other.”

“I think an ideal society,” an uncannily quiet kid named Phil said, addressing an old subject, “wouldn’t have priests and nuns.”

“Yeah,” Sarah, a tall gaunt transfer senior, agreed. “They’d either convert to reality or we’d kill ‘em.”

“That’s friendly,” Tristan said.

Sarah glared at him. “No, it’s not. But neither are they.”

“Hey guys,” Phil said, his eyes rising from his books in revelation. “We should kill people.”

“Yeah!” Christa laughed. “We can start with Dan Parker and Terry Fields and Heather Delaney.”

“That’s a good list,” Nyota agreed.

“But by no means complete,” Dingo added.

“Okay,” Christa laughed. “We’ll kill the whole student council. Then the football team, then the cheerleading squad. It’ll be like Heathers. ‘Cept we won’t get caught.”

Everyone laughed except Phil. He had a look of profound earnestness on his face, and seemed a little offended that his suggestion had been taken so lightly.

“I’m serious, guys,” he said. “We could really kill people.”

A round of nods and a change of conversation. Phil continued to reverie, staring down at the Fear sticker on his folder with the double F logo and the words I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU FUCK YOU written around it. Sarah watched him stare, then snatched the folder away. He pulled back and a few seconds later they were embroiled in a vicious slapping match. Dingo preached again about Heinlein, to whomever would listen, talking about some proverb that said if people around you smear blue mud in their belly buttons, you should too. Nyota debated the ethics of such “conformity” and the two of them became locked in a more theoretical form of what Phil and Sarah were doing. Christa smiled from the head of the table at the chaos, then turned to Tristan.

“You’ll get used to us,” she said.