Woman on the Edge of Time, Page 31

  “You’re playing them along, aren’t you?” She came up beside him as he was mopping the day room.

  “Why not?” he asked her. He had become friendly again, but he no longer flirted or told her wild stories. He was numb, stripped to a wire of will she could feel. They had not burned out or cut out as much as they thought, she hoped. Something of Skip survived.

  FOURTEEN

  Jackrabbit went on defense. For a week Luciente sank into a low energy state that made it hard for them to connect. Then she took a day’s retreat at Treefrog and seemed herself to Connie.

  Lunch at Mattapoisett was yellow soup thickened with tidbits of shrimp, crab, clam, and fish. Hawk was eating with them again, after several weeks with her friend Thunderbolt’s family.

  “It got dull, sitting at the table with mems I can’t talk to. Now the taboo’s off, I’m back. I think I’d warm to stay in our family. See, today I brought a guest for lunch.”

  Connie had often seen visitors besides herself, mostly people from nearby villages or others on their way through, traveling on some piece of business. Sometimes a whole troupe of players or musicians stopped for a week. Old friends or former mems came visiting. Then there were the people without village called politely drifters and impolitely puffs. Once she had seen a man with a small tattoo on his palm, which Luciente told her marked a crime of violence. Unlike the other guests, drifters often sat apart. People seemed uncomfortable with them. Sometimes they seemed to know each other, and when Connie passed near them, she heard a slang she did not recognize.

  Why did Hawk bring this guest to the table? Connie saw on his palm that same tattoo, that warning mark. He was a big-boned oversized man with little flesh on him, perhaps in his late thirties.

  “Waclaw just got done studying with the Cree!” Hawk bubbled.

  “On the Attawapiskat. That flows into James Bay from the west.” He spoke in a hesitant voice from deep in his barrel chest.

  “How long did you have to wait to study there?” Hawk asked. “Did you have to wait long?”

  “Six years,” Waclaw said. “I was lucky they took me at all.”

  “Six years!” Hawk’s face sagged. “That’s bottoming!”

  “If they let everyone come who wants to study with them, they’d be swamped,” Waclaw said reasonably. “Most people won’t wait and so they don’t have to say no.”

  “Was it worth it, waiting so long?” Hawk asked, still whining with disappointment.

  Waclaw nodded. “It firmed me. I almost stayed. I am going to see my old village and decide. They say I can come back if I choose, to the Attawapiskat.”

  As soon as lunch was over, Connie asked Luciente, “He’s a criminal, isn’t he? I saw a tattoo.”

  “Not anymore. Person atoned. Has been studying up north.”

  “The Cree, he said? Like Indians. You still have real Indians?”

  Luciente nodded. “Those lands are strongly protected, under their control. Only hunting, gathering, and some scientific activities go on … . The Cree have a mixed way of living. They hunt and fish, they’ve created some Far North agriculture, some handicraft, limited manufacture. They have to take care, for the land is fragile.”

  “What’s to study there?”

  “A discipline, a sense of wholeness. Something ancient. They are often part-time hunters or gatherers, part time shamans, part-time scientists.”

  “But was that his atoning? Going up north and living that way?”

  “Never!” Luciente laughed from the belly. “That’s a great privilege. That’s why Waclaw had to wait six years. Don’t know what person did to atone. Ask, if you must, but we usually don’t. We feel it’s closed—healed. Forget!”

  Connie followed at Luciente’s heels into the experimental fields where Luciente was recording comments on performance. “This chews it up. I think we found some good strains to work on next year.”

  “How come you leave so much woods?” Connie asked. “Like that argument at the council. All over Mouth-of-Mattapoisett I see patches of woods, meadows, swamps, marshes. You could clear a lot more land.”

  “We have far more land growing food than you did. But, Connie, aside from the water table, think of every patch of woods as a bank of wild genes. In your time thousands of species were disappearing. We need that wild genetic material to breed with … . That’s only the answer from the narrow viewpoint of my own science.”

  Bee waved to them, leading a group of kids through the fields on a combination bug survey and lesson in insect life. “Good luck in Oldtown!” he shouted. “Push us over!”

  Connie looked after his broad glistening back, the shirt peeled off and tied around his waist. “What’s he talking about?”

  “I have to fall by Oldtown later and present our new recks.”

  “Wrecks?”

  “Half word, half rib. Grasp, it’s a request but we wish it was a requisition. For what we want to do scientifically this winter.”

  Connie made a face. She let Luciente burble on awhile about the Shaping controversy, but finally she burst out, “It’s so hard for me to think of you as a scientist!”

  “How not? I don’t comprend.”

  “I mean the only scientist I know is Dr. Redding … . I guess we’re his experiments. But I’d hardly ever meet a scientist, I mean, like in East Harlem. Not that I’d want to …”

  “What’s different about meeting a scientist and meeting a shelf diver?”

  “Like my sister Inez, she lives in New Mexico. Her husband drinks, she has seven kids. After the sixth, she went to the clinic for the pill. You know—No, you can’t! It’s so hard for a woman like her—a real Catholic, not lapsed like me, under his thumb too and him filling her with babies one right after the other—so hard for her to say, Basta ya! And go for the pill. See, she thought she went to a doctor. But he had his scientist cap on and he was experimenting. She thought it was good she got the pill free. But they gave her a sugar pill instead. This doctor, he didn’t say what he was doing. So she got heavy again with the seventh child. It was born with something wrong. She’s tired and worn out with making babies. You know you have too many and the babies aren’t so strong anymore. They’re dear to you but a little something wrong. So this one, Richard, he was born dim in the head. Now they have all that worry and money troubles. They’re supposed to give him pills and send him to a special school, but it costs. All because Inez thought she had a doctor, but she got a scientist.”

  “All this is really so?” Luciente stared from black eyes hard with wonder.

  She looked away to the river, just a stream here with coffee-brown waters. They were heading back toward Mattapoisett now, passing as always older people, children, young people working here and there, weeding and feeding, picking off beetles, setting out new plants, arguing earnestly with scowls and gestures, hurrying by carrying a load of something shiny balanced in a basket on the head or in a knapsack or basket on the back, baby under arm or on hip or back. “They like to try out medicine on poor people. Especially brown people and black people. Inmates in prisons too. So … you must test drugs on people too? You have to.”

  “We use computers for biological modeling. Most drugs are discarded long before the testing stage. In your time I think people talked about effects and side effects, but that’s nonsense.”

  “How? Like when I take Thorazine, the effects are controlling me, making me half dead, but I get lots of side effects, believe me, like sore throat and … constipation, dizziness, funny speech.”

  “But, Connie blossom, all are effects! Your drug companies labeled things side effects they didn’t want as selling points. It’s a funny way to look at things, like a horse in blinkers.”

  She thrust out her chin. “But there’s a difference. The main effect is the thing you do something for.”

  “But Connie! The world doesn’t know that. Don’t you see? Let’s go around this way—the bees have been set out today.” They walked through part of the Goat Hill complex, where f
ish were being raised in solar-heated tanks and the water fertilized by the fish was used to grow vegetables. Inside the fish domes, men and women, gleaming with sweat, were working wearing only brief shorts. Outside there was a special cooling-off pool with people splashing and swimming in it. “Instance, a factory makes a product. But that’s not all. It makes there be less of whatever it uses up to make that product. Every pound of steel used we have to account for—whether what’s made is needed and truly desired. It’s a pound less for something else … . Let’s get a bike.”

  “You’ll have to pedal for me.” Connie hung back.

  “Fasure I’ll tote you like a baby. We’re for Oldtown.” On a two-seater, Luciente argued over her shoulder a little breathlessly. “A factory may also produce pollution—which takes away drinking water downstream. Dead fish we can’t eat. Diseases or gene defects. These too are products of that factory. A factory uses up water, power, space. It uses up the time, the lives of those who work in it. If the work is boring and alienating, it produces bored, angry people—”

  “You didn’t answer me who drugs are tested on. I want to know. Is it criminals?”

  “I’m sorry. I started speeching. We volunteer.”

  “I’ll bet. That’s what they say about the prisons. They said Claud volunteered for the hepatitis. But for a buck a day, you’d kill your best friend in prison. Because you got no other way to touch money. Everything in the canteen costs. Your family’s in trouble. You want time off. They say maybe you’ll get parole if you go along. So you volunteer.”

  “But nobody lacks here. All you get for volunteering is a little prestige. Local councils may give luxury credits or extra sabbatical. Mostly just time off. If enough people won’t volunteer for something, we put it aside. Sometimes people choose such a proj for atoning, but that’s between them and whoever you hurt.”

  “Have you ever volunteered?”

  “Not for drugs. I don’t like taking drugs, even when I’m supposed to. We don’t use them much. We do co-op curing, when the healer helps the person firm better habits of minding, better eating or carriage of the spine.” She pedaled at a steady rate. They were cruising past Mattapoisett now, past the weir, and Morningstar, who was loading boxes of pillows and comforters on a boat, stopped to wave. They passed the bridge to Cranberry and pedaled toward the wharves of Oldtown. “I’ve put in for testing new apparatus. Broke my scapula testing a solar airboat. We do admire each other for taking chances for the common good. Everybody is feathered to be admired, how not? More love, more attent. Besides, everybody always yearns for extra time. Life is short and there’s so much to do!”

  They left the bike at one of the racks and walked along a path in Oldtown, where the main harbor was. It was a Portuguese village whose main activities were boatbuilding, boat repair, shell-fishing, and deep-sea fishing.

  “They get up at three or four in the morning when the boats go out, so evening meetings are out for them. They have their meets in the afternoon, so that’s why I have to present a reck at three P.M. Isn’t it beautiful here? Some of these buildings are four hundred years old!”

  They had adapted the old buildings, although between them were the same fields and plantings as everyplace else. An old man with a wispy beard was slowly picking blackberries, eating some, putting most in a basket over his withered arm, on what must once have been the lawn of a resort hotel. With him was a child who was eating rather more than picking and singing with him sometimes in unison and sometimes in a bouncy counterpoint, interrupting with questions every few minutes which he slowly answered.

  “Why is life short?” Connie asked. “Your old people are healthy, sure, they live with everybody else. But they age. And they die, not much later than we do. Why not live longer?”

  “We decided not to try.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “The councils. The town meetings. That’s how general questions of direction of science get decided.”

  “You mean by people like me? How could I decide if they should build an atom bomb or something?”

  “Of course you could decide. It affects you—how not? A rep from the base talks. On the local level for a small proj. But if it’s a major proj—such as research on prolonging life would be—then everybody decides. What it would cost to begin. What it would use up in the way of resources and labor. All that would be set out. What would be consequences on the whole yin-and-yang of it, that we could foresee or guess.”

  “But how could I know if you’re a good scientist or not? I know nothing from nothing about genetics. By the time I figured it all out, I’d be an old woman.”

  “You couldn’t tell. But you could decide whether my base should stiff on breeding borer-resistant zucchini or scab-free potatoes or gorgeous and edible day lilies. As for results, whether experiments are valid, we researchers all put in time checking each other’s work. Done by lot.”

  “But it sounds like some kind of dictatorship. I mean in our time, science was kept … pure maybe. Only scientists could judge other scientists. All kinds of stories about how scientists got persecuted by the church or governments and all that because they were doing their science.”

  “But Connie, in your day only huge corporations and the Pentagon had money enough to pay for big science. Don’t you think that had an effect on what people worked on? Sweet petunias! And what we do comes down on everybody. We use up a confounded lot of resources. Scarce materials. Energy. We have to account. There’s only one pool of air to breathe. You grasp neurologists made the aplysia extinct by using it up in experiments? Almost did the same to chimpanzees! What arrogance!”

  “But why don’t you prolong life? Did old people vote on that too?”

  “Fasure. We did a breakdown by age after to make sure young weren’t voting extended age away from the old … . I think it comes down to the fact we’re stirr reducing population. Longer people live less often we can replace them. But most every lug wants the chance to mother. Therefore, we have to give back. We have to die. Finally, people get tired. After a while people you were sweet friends with, hand friends, they die of accidents or diseases, whatever. The old age of the heart comes.”

  “You just give up.”

  “We’re part of the web of nature. Don’t you find that beautiful?”

  “Like dumb animals? No! Dust to dust and all that?”

  “We have a hundred ceremonies to heal us to the world we live in with so many others. Listen.” Luciente waved toward the child and the old man, who had finished picking blackberries. They sang together as they got ready to leave:

  “Thank you for fruit.

  We take what we need.

  Other animals will eat.

  Thank you for fruit,

  carrying your seed.

  What you give is sweet.

  Live long and spread!”

  “We learn when we’re kids to say that to every tree or bush we pick from.”

  Seconal or not, she did not sleep that night. The next morning they were coming for her, they were going to take her to the hospital where they performed the actual operations. Night before the electric chair. She stared into the thin dark, the light on down the hall at the nurses’ station, where the weekend night crew were playing contract bridge. They had an ongoing game in which the night nurse played partners with Stan the Man, the women’s attendant Jean played partners with the orderly Chris. The nurse and Stan the Man were ten years older than Jean and Chris, and they called their game the Generation Gap. They were full of jokes and drank beer all night.

  Although their game was noisy, they were not what was keeping her awake, no more than Tina’s soft mumbled snoring from the other bed. It was the morning to come. Tomorrow they were going to stick a machine in her brain. She was the experiment. They would rape her body, her brain, her self. After this she could not trust her own feelings. She would not be her own. She would be their experimental monster. Their plaything, like Alice. Their tool. She did not want to pass over to Matt
apoisett tonight; she wanted to taste the last dregs of her identity before they took it from her.

  Lying in the partial dark, she found anger swelling up in her like sour wind. There wasn’t enough! Oh, not enough things, sure—not enough food to eat, clothes to wear, all of that But there wasn’t enough … to do. To enjoy. Ugliness had surrounded her, had imprisoned her all her life. The ugliness of tenements, of slums, of El Barrio—whether of El Paso, Chicago, or New York—the grimy walls, the stinking streets, the stained air, the dark halls smelling of piss and stale cooking oil, the life like an open sore, had ground away her strength.

  Whoever owned this place, these cities, whoever owned those glittering glassy office buildings in midtown filled with the purr of money turning over, those refineries over the river in Jersey with their flames licking the air, they gave nothing back. They took and took and left their garbage choking the air, the river, the sea itself. Choking her. A life of garbage. Human garbage. She had had too little of what her body needed and too little of what her soul could imagine. She had been able to do little in the years of her life, and that little had been ill paid or punished. The rest was garbage.

  Who could ever pay for the pain of bringing a child into dirt and pain? Never enough. Nothing you wanted to give her you ever could give her, including yourself, what you wanted to be with her and for her. Nothing you wanted for her could come true. Who could ever pay for the pain of rising day after day year after year in a dim room dancing with cockroaches, and looking out on a street like a sewer of slow death? All her life it felt to her she had been dying a cell at a time, a cell of hope, of joy, of love, little lights going out one by one. When her body had turned all to pain, would she die? Die and poison the earth like a plague victim, like so many pounds of lead?