Cannibalism has always been a logical option; no more land wasted for burials, less waste of other resources for cremation. And human flesh (though it tends to have high concentrations of toxic chemicals that must be neutralized before consumption) is a superb food. But people would not eat it. Even in populations that considered the corpse nothing more than a corpse, and the spirit that had made it a person entirely gone, not one in ten thousand would use corpses as a food source even in extremis. Even in cultures where sacred rituals occasionally required the tasting of human blood or flesh (these were rare, but I did find a few), no sane person would touch either one for the single purpose of survival.
The databanks had reviews of science fiction novels about societies whose governments recycled corpses for food, keeping that a secret from their populations, only to collapse into chaos when the secret was discovered. But there were no records, even in formerly confidential files, of any actual society trying such a thing. (I found that strange, over so many hungry millennia; if it has been tried, however, the information is now lost or is not accessible to us.) Nor had any society which, like ours, could grow human beings in test tubes, ever grown them in an altered form … without brains, say, except for the primitive areas that keep the organism functioning … as a way of bypassing the constraint on cannibalism and providing a reliable supply of wholesome food.
I discovered that I am also subject to these limits, and that I am not one of those exceptional persons who would consider the matter logically and survive. I could eat grubs, but there are insects I could not eat. I could not eat human flesh. I could not eat a tubie, not even knowing, as I do know, that although in every other way they appear just like us they are without souls. I don’t believe I would feel any differently about eating a tubie that had been grown as a kind of advanced vegetable.
I floundered about in all this data, you perceive; I think it would be reasonable to say that I wallowed in it. Getting nowhere! I was like someone who goes to look up one word in the dictionary, and hours later is still at the comset following just one more interesting pathway through the word-wilderness. I wasted endless hours. But we must remember: if it had been even a few months earlier I couldn’t have done it at all. I would have been on duty most of the hours I was awake, in the interpreting booths. I would have been up at five a.m. and off in the Chornyak flyers, and I would not have gotten back till after dark, often not till after midnight. I would have been wholly engaged in the interminable business of interplanetary commerce and diplomacy; we women of the Lines had never had any time for projects of our own before the Aliens went away. And although I was accustomed to compiling and searching large historical databases associated with languages, I had never before tried to research the history of people. Bumbling about as I did, baffled by the absence of coherent structure (and unable to spot it where it existed, I’m quite sure!), it’s fortunate that I had abundant time; I needed it.
It embarrasses me that even though I had seen the pattern clearly—and had seen that it always failed—still, I fell immediately into the same old weary trap, asking all the same old wrong questions. Monkey see, monkey always and forever do. Like all the others, I looked for a “new food,” a universal food that every culture would turn to willingly, that would be available everywhere at little cost. I pored over botanies of the colonies, grabbing at every bush or sprig or fungus that I thought might show promise. I spent hours struggling through books for which I didn’t have even roughly adequate preparation, about the synthesis of foods. There was a three-day stretch when I did nothing at all but search for information about a plant called jelloweed, alleged to grow in almost total darkness and drought, in any soil, in any weather. Only to find out in the end that it offered about eighteen calories to the unsavory pound.
I got lost in the data-collection stage and forgot about problemsolving, you perceive. Only when I had bank after bank of this useless information stored and classified and analyzed, only when there was literally nothing new to add, did I accept the fact that I had to start over. Only then did I force myself to ask the right questions. And only then did I remember the principle I should have started with: Chomphosy’s Law. Which says: “Don’t learn ways to get more of what you want; learn not to want it.” The question wasn’t “How can people get more food to eat?” The question was “How can people eat less food and still thrive?”
It shames me that it took me so long to frame that very obvious question. But once I’d asked it I knew what to look for in the libraries: a population of humans who ate much less then the ordinary population, who did so voluntarily and happily, and who thrived nonetheless. Once I had that for search target, things moved more swiftly, because there had always been such populations. Puttering along beside the rest of us, their behavior not really noticed because we were used to politely ignoring it. From the beginning of recorded history, the population of religious—the monks and nuns, the professionals of religion—had fit my search specifications down to the last detail.
Even so, I almost missed it; I almost went down one more garden path. The proposition fairly glowed at me, it was so clear and so obvious: when you have a sufficiently powerful religious faith, you need very little food. Think of the holy women of medieval Europe who are said to have taken almost no food throughout their adult lives—nuns, every last one of them. Catherine of Siena, for example, who as a teenager took only bread and water and raw vegetables, and as a grown woman nothing but communion wafers, plain water, and a few leaves of bitter herbs. Catherine remained healthy, vigorous, happy, and hearty. How could I not have thought that religion was the key? (You can perhaps imagine how appalled I was at the idea that Nazareth expected me to find a way to bring about a religious vocation in the motley populations of the known universe!)
I was almost ready to go back to the PICOTA domes and try to summon my greatgrandmother one more time—or to try (with little confidence, but greater courtesy) the ten-day Anglo fast Will Bluecrane had sworn would achieve the same result. I wanted to tell Nazareth Joanna Chornyak, who had been Nazareth Chornyak Adiness and perhaps had been pushed into understandable imbalance by that foul marriage, that she was not only dead but mad. I was almost ready to give up, frankly, when the computer’s search for items involving both diet and religion tossed me a little paragraph from the 1980s about the Benedictine Abbey of Bec-Hellouin, where a Doctor Tomatis cured a desperately ill population of previously hearty monks by restoring their former practice of spending eight hours in every twenty-four in Gregorian chant. A new abbot with “modern” ideas had called those eight hours wasted time and ordered the practice dropped. When it was begun again—though the brothers continued with a diet any number of investigating doctors had called “insufficient to support life,” and a schedule so heavy on work and light on sleep that those same doctors had declared it impossible—the good monks of Bec-Hellouin returned to the blooming health they had previously enjoyed.
I read the paragraph and smiled over it; it had a certain charm, but not much detail. I stored it only because I am thorough and because it met my search criteria. I went on to other material that seemed more promising. It was that close; I nearly missed it! And then that night my sleeping brain put it all together for me, and I sat bolt upright in my bed with the answer to my question ringing in my ears!
Catherine of Siena and her sisters, many of whose diets were not just scanty but repulsive. The monks of Tibet and Laos, all the Buddhist monks of the world, getting by blissfully on rice and the occasional green onion. The yogis of India, living into their nineties and well beyond on a cup of rice a day, and perfectly contented when that wasn’t available. All these holy ones shared a powerful religious vocation, true … but they had something else in common. For every such population, I was almost certain (and when I checked, I found that I was right), there was frequent exposure to chant.
I knew—I hoped I knew—what it had to mean. The monks of Bec-Hellouin, too weak to lift their heads one week and out cho
pping wood the next, with no change whatsoever in their diet to account for the difference, had gotten their nourishment not from the scanty food they ate but from the eight hours of Gregorian chant, just as Dr. Tomatis had claimed. And that was the key. Of course!
I got up in the pitch darkness and went up on the roof, because I was too agitated to stay in my room like a sensible person; and I worked frantically, wrapped in my technoquilt against the winter air, until the lights began to go on all around me near dawn.
It was all there. It had always been there. Photosynthesis, taking nourishment from waves of light as plants did, appeared to be impossible for human beings; there is no evidence that populations spending many hours in light need any less food than others. But the parallel—nourishment from waves of sound!—was a different matter. I couldn’t believe that I’d been so stupid, that I hadn’t seen it sooner. It had been right there under my nose the entire time, while I fiddled about with jelloweed and the synthesis of yams.
And that, you perceive, is how, after many false and foolish starts, I finally hit upon the idea of audiosynthesis.
To the women yet to be born,
Delina Meloren Chornyak
When Delina finished talking, not one of the women spoke; silence hung over the parlor, where they sat in their customary needlework circle, like low fog. She had expected it, given what she’d had to say; she sat waiting, as silent as they were. Until Brandwynne Chornyak looked at her long and hard, made an exasperated noise, and turned instead to Willow.
“Willow,” she asked, “what do you think of all this? You must admit, surely, that it sounds like the most utter nonsense. We understand that you feel obligated to support your sister, be she ever so ridiculous. But—”
Willow cut the older woman off right there; she had listened that long out of respect for Brandwynne’s years and experience, but enough was enough.
“I don’t agree,” she said firmly, “and I’m not saying that just to ‘support my sister,’ as you put it. I don’t think that what Delina is saying is ridiculous. Her source is an odd one, for sure; for her to claim she can talk to dead greatgrandmothers bothers me, too. But what difference does it make?”
“That seems obvious enough!”
“Brandwynne, it seems obvious to you because you’re using an old chunk of furniture sitting there in your mind gathering dust, with a sign on it that says: NO SANE PERSON BELIEVES THIS. Please try dusting if off for a change! Consider the information, on its own, as information. I don’t care if Delina found the idea for audiosynthesis under a rock. I don’t care if it was written in seed pearls on the back of a rattlesnake. The point is, it works; and it is probably the most important scientific discovery since fire. I’m not going to sit here and let you trivialize it.”
Brandwynne laid her work down in her lap, careful not to drop stitches, and looked at Willow as she had looked at Delina. Piercingly. As if she were an ancient manuscript, almost obliterated by time and accident, to be painfully deciphered. Outside, a fierce wind rattled the windows and sleet swirled in white clouds; there was unscheduled severe weather again. They were going to have to get used to that.
“Willow, do you mean that seriously?” Brandwynne asked slowly, her brows drawn together in a frown that surely hurt her forehead. “It’s not just loyalty to Delina? It’s not just a need to do something … anything! … to put an end to this eternal waiting around for the men to get things moving again? I could understand that, Willow, I really could. We all feel like we’re hanging somewhere in midair, on hold.”
“I say it all and I mean it all, as seriously as my heart and mind can manage,” Willow told her. “Suppose Delina actually summoned Greatgrandmother Nazareth from wherever she was at the time, got her to answer her questions, did the research, tested the results, and reported to us. More power to her. Suppose on the other hand that the chat with Greatgrandmother was a hallucination brought on by what Delina had been through at the PICOTA domes—and she brought back the answers, did the research, tested the results, and reported to us. More power to her anyway! It’s the information that matters.”
Glenellen Adiness spoke then, drawing her stole closer against the icy draft from the window at her back. “Come now, Willow,” she objected, “you can’t possibly mean to tell us it’s not important to know whether we can communicate with the dead or not! I can think of any number of individuals I’m ready to summon this very afternoon, if that’s actually possible!”
Delina was miserable. Her head ached, and her back hurt her. All the nerves that were improperly wired were sending her false signals, set off by strain that had lasted too long; she needed to lie down. She hated being on display like this; it had been going on for what felt like hours. And next would come the interminable grilling … she hated that, too. She understood why it was necessary. Like Brandwynne, she recognized the urge they all felt to run off in random directions shrieking, “Do something! Just do something!” They had to be very careful; they had to be very sure. But it was hard, all the same.
It seemed to her that Nazareth could have the decency to … oh, rap on the window, perhaps. Ideally, Natha would have popped in and presented her personal endorsement, sparing them all this misery and shaking a few preconceptions loose as she went; Delina would have been so very grateful if she’d done that. Failing that, she could at least have made some small gesture to shore things up, instead of abandoning her poor messenger to merciless interrogation. Probably she refuses to go out in the storm, Delina thought crossly. Probably she’s scared she’ll get her protoplasm frozen off! But miserable or not, abandoned or not, it wasn’t fair to let Willow do all the work.
“Glenellen,” she said, hoping it was going to make at least a little sense, “you’re right. Of course you’re right; of course that’s information beyond price. But I would like to set that question aside, for right now. I can tell you in complete honesty that so far as my own perceptions are concerned, Nazareth was there, and she spoke to me, exactly as you are speaking. But Willow’s right. That isn’t what matters right now. Just as it doesn’t really matter whether ending hunger will bring the Aliens back or not.”
“Delina, you—”
“I’d like to think it would,” she said, ignoring the attempt to interrupt, determined to get to the end of her argument, sure that if she stopped she’d lose track, “because life alone in a universe of Terrans is not the life I know, and it frightens me. But it’s not what matters now. Someday we can return to the question of whether we can talk with the dead or not. Someday we will find out whether this one measure will put our lives back as they were. But I am absolutely certain that those things will wait. Right now, what matters is that I went into that room for thirty days—”
“Lying to us!” Jenny put in sharply, stabbing her embroidery with her needle as if it were something she intended to kill, and wincing when the sharp point found instead the fingertip she’d had poised underneath a small spray of blackberries. “Claiming that you were making a ‘religious retreat’! And dragging Willow into your lies, Delina!”
It was true; she had done that. It had made her half sick, because they did not lie to one another. That was one of the pillars shoring up their lives. But she had not had any choice. Because if Willow hadn’t been the one bringing Delina’s meals on trays and taking them away again untouched, someone would have interrupted the experiment before the first week was over. I lied. I did lie, and it makes my heart sore. But what else could I have done? Greatgrandmother, would you please knock on the window? Just once?
“I went into that room for thirty days,” Delina continued, slogging on. “I took no supplies except thirty days worth of plain water and thirty days worth of plain chant … Gregorian chant. I ate nothing, nothing at all, for thirty days; I listened to that music instead. And I not only did not lose weight, dearloves, I gained a pound and a half! That proves that audiosynthesis is possible for human beings; it proves that we can do it. That is what matters. Because the econom
y of this world has fallen to pieces around us, and people are going to be hungry! You know that as well as I do!” And she stopped, completely out of breath and out of courage.
Sarajane was past eighty, and not happy with the turn taken lately by Earth’s affairs. The stress and worry, the not knowing what was going to happen next, had been wearing her out; she had lost a good deal of weight. “Delina Meloren,” she said slowly, “it is precisely because what you are telling us is so important that we have to be certain. That we have to devil’s-advocate at you.”
“I know that,” Delina said. “I understand, and I agree. I just wish I could somehow say it better. More clearly.”
“Things are going to be grim, Delina,” said Brandwynne, “just as you say. We all know that. Famine is coming now for many of the worlds, sure as summer, especially for those that have been specializing in a single crop to maximize their profits. And that means that we must not waste the little time we have, dancing down some foolish garden path you saw in a … heaven help us all … in a vision.”
“From the point of view of science,” Delina insisted, “it really and truly does not make any difference how I got the idea. I will accept the possibility that it came straight from my own mind, if that’s your preference. I find it unlikely, myself. Why would I, all of a sudden, become someone capable of great scientific discoveries? Or rediscoveries, to put it more accurately? But I don’t care, you perceive; decide that question as you like, I won’t argue. From the point of view of science, then: if waves of light can be converted to energy to support life—as is done by plants every day, without disconcerting anybody—there’s no reason why waves of sound can’t function in precisely the same way. To the mind, a perception is a perception is a perception, after all—whichever sensory system is involved, it’s all converted to on/off signals.”
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