Pan Sagittarius (2509 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  Edom, swimming fully clothed, cursed, tore off his clothing (which was a leaf apron), hurled it at Avé on the shore, and yelled: “Why am I wearing this nuisance? I can’t even remember how you talked me into it—”

  As Avé rose, shocked, to her feet, prepared to remind him, I saw that this pair of primeval lives was simply loaded with if-nodes: Edom’s fruit-induced mental clarity had worn off, blurring his recall of the reasoning. Ave, of course, would remind him—she had more at stake, she had to remember…

  That was when I nudged her with an ineluctable urgency. And she hurried away to the secret place where she and Edom carefully magicked and buried their body discards in the fear that some enemy would find them and use them to steal their souls…

  Floating comfortably on his back, languidly spurting water upward from his mouth so that it splashed on his hairy chest, Edom was too rapturously lethargic to be startled when the python that I now inhabited erected head and neck from the pond surface not a yard away and said: “Hi, Edom.” He replied pleasantly: “Hi, Snake. I didn’t know you could talk.”

  “I was watching your swimming.”

  “Pretty good, huh?”

  “Just fair.” I could get this idea across on the semantic level that Man had already attained: when oldsters were training youngsters to run and fight and throw stones, they had to develop adjectives for progress that was short of high proficiency.

  And already I had activated an if-node. The old old track of the Edom and Avé story would continue eternally to filament changelessly; but parallel with it, I now had a new thing growing…

  Edom stopped floating, trod water, and turned to me full-face. “How do you mean, just fair?”

  “Well, what I really mean is—clumsy. You ought to keep working at your swimming until it becomes graceful.”

  “Clumsy” Edom understood; but—“Until it becomes what?” I responded, “Watch me”; and for a few moments I python-rippled through the water. Returning to Edom, I asserted: “That’s graceful. See what I mean? You try it.”

  Valiantly Edom splashed about a bit, nearly drowned, floundered to pond’s edge, and lay face down on the grass, recovering. My tongue sympathetically flicked his ear.

  He turned to me: “You’re right, I’m clumsy. How can I get graceful?”

  “You are clumsy in lots of ways,” I told him austerely. “You can’t swim like Snake, you can’t run and jump like Antelope. And your behavior with Ave—boy, is it clumsy!”

  Edom did a push-up, eye to eye with my erected snake head. “What’s clumsy about that?”

  “Do you really want to learn to be graceful?”

  “Can you teach me, Snake?”

  “Follow me,” I ordered. “There’s a tree that I want to show you.”

  As the concept of grace would elaborate, and as Avé would catch it-from Edom, interpersonal respect and desire to please would become entailed. And as the concept of clumsiness would elaborate—based, as it was, on something they already understood: clumsiness in learning to walk, for instance, a concept that was never absolute but merely degrees removed from grace—self-recognition that one was clumsy in some way might automatically engender not abiding self-gnawing guilt but urgent discontent accompanied by knowledge that one could with effort keep getting more graceful.

  They might gird up their loins—but not with guilt, merely with humor, and not compulsively. They would evolve elaborate costuming—but for grace, not for flamboyant elaboration of a fundamental self-concealment.

  Of all clumsiness, the clumsiest—as social consciousness would elaborate—would be intentional or inadvertent interference with another’s progress toward grace: interference by killing or in any other way. Of all grace, the most graceful would be even a clumsy effort to help another along the way of grace that the other had chosen for himself.

  It might stick from generation to generation—or it might degenerate into the old repressive taboo morality—or the eventuation might be somewhere between. But at least, it was a new start—a beginning with a different kind of mindset. Its future would depend on the people.

  Part Four

  Willy the Villain

  Pan, you are going to the planet Berlioz, and to its dominant nation Paladia, in an era when its dominant race was black. A subordinated white race was seeking equality, but the black masters were persistently holding them down. In one activity, pugilism, the whites were so often gaining superiority that the blacks were beginning to resent it in a symbolic way.

  Two white brothers, Champion Brownie Brown (a White Power leader) and Challenger Willy Brown (publicly identified with racial integration), fought fifteen rounds for the world’s championship, and Brownie won handily on points. Using his victory to claim national leadership of the revolutionary White Power Party, Brownie incited aggressive white support by singing that he had symbolically licked his brother the Champion of Appeasement. A direct outcome was a fiery white revolution which gutted the cities of Paladia, most particularly the city called Kashmir which had apparented the Brown brothers. Shortly afterward, Willy and Brownie clashed in a saloon; Willy stabbed Brownie to death and later committed suicide.

  Both souls are here in Hell: Brownie ulcerating himself with remorse for his Pyrrhic victory in the ring, Willy lacerating himself with regret for losing the first fight and for winning the second.

  What can you do, Pan, about nudging them into some alternate track for their souls’ sake?

  4

  Heavyset ash-blond 220-pound contender Willy the Villain Brown stood loose and ready, head and hands hanging, in ring center forehead to forehead with whip-lithe smooth-fair chestnut-haired 210-pound champion Brownie Brown while a bald beetle-browed stupid-studious black dwarf-referee haltingly gave them the instructions that both of them knew and told them to fight clean and sent them back to their corners. Just before they parted, Brownie slapped the backs of Willy’s gloves and muttered: “Hit me good, brother—I’d love you to win, but I got no mercy.” Willy just grunted and went away.

  In round one, Willy shambled and poked and missed; Brownie danced like an angel, and occasionally he poked lightly and hit without hurting and danced away. It was how the aficionados (mostly black, of course) had figured the first round; and everybody except Willy—everybody including (secretly) Willy’s white handlers and black manager—assumed that Brownie would carry his brother Willy for ten or twelve rounds, outpointing him steadily, and then would heavily outpoint him for the last three to five rounds, winning the bout handily without ruining Willy.

  Consequently, everybody figured it for a dull fight…

  I was backtracking the boys in time. My mental dowsing rod had basement-floored me in a high-school classroom nearly ten years before—when Willy had been seventeen, when swift-minded sixteen-year-old Brownie had advanced to Willy’s class.

  It was an eleventh-grade civics class in Kashmir, one of the largest cities of Paladia, the dominant nation of the planet Berlioz. The ruling race in Paladia had always been black—since, that is, the blacks had immigrated to Paladia and practically exterminated the red aborigines; but the inward ghettos of their cities were packed with misery-ridden whites who once had been overseas-imported slaves but now were theoretically free-and-equal citizens. All the blacks were pure black, features-and-flesh—or, more properly, chocolate; their hair was usually neat black wool, their noses were mostly aristocratic-flat, their lips tended to run handsome-full (in contrast to white lips which were thin like monkey lips), their teeth were unbelievably beautiful: they rode on millennia of pride in their beauty. The manners of their upper middle class were exquisite, of their upper class aristocratic-easy, of their middle and lower-middle classes nervous-correct; and if their lower classes were junky, they were a small, indolent minority. As for the whites, most of them had degenerately thin lips and sharp-chiseled features and stringy hair without a single baroque-handsome kink; but some were tawny or even brown with blurred features telltale of black blood, usually picked
up by ancestral slave women under black masters. Upper-and middle-class whites were in their manners and mores indistinguishable from upper-and middle-class blacks; nevertheless they were shunned by most blacks, or patronized by tolerant blacks, and they were a thin minority. Most whites were impoverished lower class, a status that most middle-class blacks considered inevitable for whites because of hereditary white inferiority.

  Some black anthropologists insisted that whites had evolved out of a lower and earlier anthropoid link than had blacks, although others insisted that it was only a matter of cultural disadvantage. Some religious blacks pointed to a Biblical basis for white inferiority. There were ultraconservative blacks who talked darkly about a different species, pointing (not with perfect consistency) to the alleged fact that most upper-middle and upper-class whites displayed complexion-and-feature evidence of black blood.

  The teacher, Mr. Lassiter, was a tawny-skinned, goldenhaired white man. He was meeting this class for the first day. He was young; and being a teacher, he was presumed to be upper-middle-class white—that is to say, a stooge for Blackie’s power structure. He faced a class of thirty-four young men and women (Lassiter was not going to call them boys and girls), thirty-one of whom were white. Among the whites, ten had definitely aligned themselves with the burgeoning White Power movement, eleven were nonaligned but emotionally sympathetic with White Power, eight had no convictions at all except that they wanted life to be as uncomplicated as possible, and two regarded themselves as Paladians temporarily disenfranchised but eventually to become equals of blacks by working at it. Among the blacks, all three were lackadaisical. This high school was not located in what a middle-class black would call the best of all possible neighborhoods.

  Having called roll laconically, restraining his impulses for sharp response to three or four scattered witty replies like “Yo!” or “Who dat want me?” Mr. Lassiter laid down his class book, came around in front of his desk, and leaned his buttocks easily back against its edge. He was skillful, all right, not green, and a natural teacher; he came from three years of experience in a fifty-fifty integrated middle-class high school.

  Scanning each face as an individual while he spoke, Mr. Lassiter began: “Our topic this semester is Paladian history. The word history may bug some of you a little—it may hit you as a remote hard topic. It isn’t. History is being alive. It is going through experiences. If you really see it, history is like remembering. You read about people a hundred years ago going through something—you imagine yourself going through it, and it is a lot like remembering yourself going through it.” Then he made his second tactical error: “How many of you find it interesting to remember things?”

  Brownie Brown raised his hand high. Willy Brown, sitting next to him, muttered: “Put down your goddam hand.” Brownie’s hand went higher. Mr. Lassiter nodded at him politely: “You, sir. What is your name?”

  Seraphically, tall rangy Brownie took the floor. His hazel eyes caught Lassiter’s attention while Brownie’s chestnut hair, as always, filled everybody’s vision: most whites in Paladia were blond-haired like Willy or goldenhaired like Lassiter, and blueeyed like Willy or green-eyed like Lassiter, these being the most common genetic characters in the continental area of Berlioz which had been the main source of the white slave market. And when black interbreeding showed its traces, the eye-hair coloring was often black. But—brown? that was a white race character, all right, but from a different quarter of Berlioz, and rare in Paladia. The eyes and hair had earned Brownie his nickname so early that he had all but forgotten his given name. They made him more than just a white man: they made him a special white man…

  Now Brownie folded his big hands in front of his pubis, closing his hazel eyes but aiming them and their chestnut eyebrow arches at the ceiling, compressing his thin lips into a moue which made his long slim fair face extra-long; and Brownie declaimed: “I, sir, am Brownie Brown, sir. I just love to remember.”

  Somebody said: “Haw!” Lassiter, sensing trouble, brought down a golden eyebrow over a piercing green eye tawny-lidded; but he held patience enough to inquire mildly: “Why, Mr. Brown? Why do you like to remember things?”

  Spreading his great arms wide, Brownie responded with the most angelic smile in God’s Heaven: “Because it helps me to keep on hating Blackie.”

  Eight of the White Power crowd roared laughter (the other two were timid); all eleven nonaligned sympathizers joined in (they liked Brownie); reinforcing derision came from five of the convictionless, one of the pro-Paladians, and one of the blacks.

  Lassiter stolidly withstood it, inwardly balancing tactical gambits to recoup this bad one, swiftly revising his three-year integrated-high-school outlook, finding his way as the laughter died and inevitably they awaited his reaction. He said to the class generally: “By the end of this course, that crack might not get a laugh; but we have a lot of background to develop before you see why.” He had studiously avoided reminding them that he too was white. Then directly: “Mr. Brown—do you have anything honest to say about remembering?”

  Brownie, making himself look shocked, protested: “But, Teach—that was honest!”

  Everybody laughed.

  As it quieted, Lassiter said softly: “Sit down, Mr. Brown”—knowing as he said it that if Brownie should choose right now to make a leadership stand, it could end in physical contact.

  Brownie spread his great arms broadly in a gesture of despair, and he sat. Chuckling. Lassiter got it, all right: this wasn’t quite the ground of Brownie’s choosing. Nevertheless he had a temporary advantage: Brownie had yielded, if only provisionally; and the trick was going to be to keep Brownie’s right ground from solidifying. He saw that Willy was glowering at Brownie…

  Folding his arms, Lassiter frowned at the floor, telling them: “I know you’re testing me, every class tests every new teacher.

  But don’t do it anymore, it hurts all of us. Asa white, sometimes I get called Blanco, and I don’t like it, but I am not going to get all hated-up because of it—instead, I am going to win equality, and I am going to help you try to win it too.” He looked up and swept them with that individual-penetrating gaze: “Do all of you think I must be a stooge for Blackie’s power structure?” Temporarily, at least, it panicked them into silence.

  “I like to remember,” he told them steadily, “because remembering what I used to be tells me how much worse it was then. I remember when I was a dirty little blanco-kid wiping my ass on used corn cobs. I also remember when I won a scholarship given by a black association that wanted whites to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, earning any help they got. I also remember the black majority on the faculty of this high school voting to have the faculty banquet at a white-owned restaurant because us white members would be turned away from a black-owned restaurant. How do you dig those memories?”

  He saw Willy and two or three others nodding slowly; most seemed sullen, which among whites meant nothing one way or another; Brownie frowned stormily at his desk, and most of the militants were watching Brownie.

  Lassiter added: “I also remember another planet in this galaxy where the nation like Paladia was dominated by whites—and they enslaved blacks.”

  Beside Brownie, a henchman howled: “Thass a goddam lie!” Viciously Brownie kicked his ankle: already he understood timing…

  Remorselessly Lassiter pressed: “Likewise I remember that just south of Paladia there is an island where whites are the majority, and blacks are second-class citizens—”

  He saw a hesitant hand go up, and he called it: “You, sir—please give me your name.”

  Willy hesitantly half stood, leaning on his desk. “Willy Brown. Sir, is that the island of Haibong?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Brown.” Were they kin?

  “Sir, my brother is in this class too, and I don’t mind if you call me Willy to keep from getting mixed up.” Turning on Brownie, he added in a threatening growl at his brother: “And Brownie won’t mind if you call him Brownie—will you
, Brownie?”

  Brownie scowled down: his scowl was Adonis-handsome.

  Lassiter had the right inspiration, which you don’t always get. “Thank you, Mr. Brown, but I don’t think it will be necessary. You’ll know which one I mean if I’m looking at you. Of course, to be sure, you’ll have to keep paying attention to me. Okay?”

  Willy stared at him; Brownie’s head came slowly up. Willy nodded once and sat…

  Nothing much happened in the second round of the championship fight, except a clear-cut revelation of the two contrasting styles. Brownie danced, occasionally throwing a left jab that invariably connected with Willy’s forehead or cheek but stayed away from eyes and drew no blood. Willy shambled, using a standard guard, once in a while getting into range and leading with a left followed by a right cross according to the textbook—both always missed. Twice Willy got inside, and there was some body jarring—at this they were equals, but it was always Brownie who got away.

  Invisible, I was tense. So was Lassiter, among the spectators…

  By the second week of the semester, Lassiter had the class manageably under his skilled spell, but Lassiter himself didn’t like the feel of it: he knew that his imaginative concept of history as remembering wasn’t getting through to them, and he knew why. At night he spent many hours talking with his wife about it; but she was really no help except as a sympathetic confidante, and she admitted it—she was third-generation urban middle-class white (which meant that her values were inhaled from the middle-class black culture that dated back at least a thousand years on two continents), and she recognized the culture gap between herself and the sorts of whites who were students of Lassiter’s.