“Mama, don’t you want your knitting?” The daughter takes Marilisa’s hands—breaking the strands of light, destroying the delicate sextuple pattern like someone stumbling, blind, through a spiderweb—and wraps her mother’s fingers tightly round the knitting needles. “There now, darling! Now you’re all set!”
Marilisa sighs … she will have to start all over again.
This isn’t new, of course; she doesn’t cry. She had given up crying about it by the time she finished at the multiversity, always having to work with the children around her, the intricate logical arguments she had to study interrupted every few minutes. She had considered herself fortunate when there were five minutes free of interruption.
Marilisa has always thought yearningly of those biographies of the great and the famous in which devoted children guard their parent, meeting visitors at the door with a hushed warning that the parent is working and must not be interrupted. In which the spouse sees to it that there is a separate room for the work to be done in, and sets a tray of food silently on the desk, tiptoeing away in order not to interfere with the work. In which the family is passionately proud of the work and sets aside all its own concerns to protect the one who does it. Her spouse, her children, had no such habits, nor any sign of them, and she knew why. If the work is treasured by the family, and the mother/wife is held precious, it happens; otherwise, no.
Marilisa had not had the knack of making herself precious. Her value had been that she was someone who knew where the clean clothes were. Under those circumstances her tears would only have added more delay, and she couldn’t have afforded that.
The universal assumption that nothing she is doing could have any importance has always distressed her. But it annoys her far more now, when these children have children and grandchildren of their own … it seems to her that they should have acquired some sense over the course of a lifetime!
“Mama, look at this pretty embroidery … you never finished it! Don’t you want to do that tiny rose in the corner, Mama? Here … I’ll help you start it!”
“Mama, you haven’t played your dulcimer for months and months … it’s not even in tune anymore. Don’t you want it? Here … I’ll put it in your lap, dear, and I’ll find your picks for you. You just decide what song you’d most like to play, all right?”
And to the doctor, when they’ve finally managed to tune him in on the comset after calling a dozen times … “Look at her, Doctor, how she frowns! She’s got to be in pain, to frown like that—Mother never frowned!”
I frowned, Marilisa thinks. I frowned all the time. I frowned when things didn’t work. I frowned when something burned in the kitchen. I frowned when they fought over their toys and wouldn’t clean their rooms. I frowned when they had fevers and spots. I frowned when I got Cs in the multiversity graduate courses—a graduate C is a graduate F, the professors told me sternly, shaking their fingers at me. Saying, “You’re not going to make it, you know. You’re a nice woman, but you’re not PhD material!” I was forever frowning. What does the fool child mean, saying I never frowned? He never looked at me, I suppose.
She frowns now when a pattern of the strands of light is becoming particularly complex, when her attention is needed … She is certainly not in any pain, and she has told them so over and over. They ignore it. They are not concerned with what she wants, but with what they are convinced she needs. Like her husband, who always bought her things he knew she needed, instead of the things she had asked him for. Marilisa had always wanted a nice drum, the kind you hold in your hand and strike with a synthowood-and-leather beater, and she had told him so over and over. And he had smiled and bought her yet another cashmere sweater. Of course, around the Christmas tree, with the children watching and the husband smiling, you cannot say, “But I told you I wanted a drum! A bhodran drum! Why did you buy me this stupid sweater?” No. That would spoil the holiday. It wasn’t necessary to ask that question, in any case; she knew what he would say back. He would say, “Darling, you need a new cashmere sweater; you don’t need a bhodran drum.”
Marilisa reaches for a lovely strand of light that floats toward her, that is a delicate color neither quite silver nor quite gold, with a luster like old pearls; she has never seen a strand quite like it before. She holds the braid she’s working on carefully, gently, with her left hand, and begins adding the new strand. She holds her breath, too, because this will make it a seven-strand braid and she has never tried one of those. The light is so beautiful, wound in and out in the overlapping patterns—
“Doctor, it’s awful to see her like this! Look at her—will you just look at her? She was always busy … always had work in her hands to do, even if she was sitting down for a minute. And now she just sits there staring at nothing, and her fingers … twisting like that … always twisting … Oh, Doctor, please … it’s breaking our hearts. Can’t you do something?”
If they come at her with the injection again, Marilisa thinks, she is going to lose her temper. It’s ridiculous. She doesn’t want to knit, or embroider, or play the dulcimer; she’s tired of all those things. She wants to do this, this new craft, this lightbraiding. And she feels she has earned the right to spend her time as she wishes to spend it. Why on earth can’t they let her alone and go about their own affairs? The injections make her sleepy, and they certainly serve no useful purpose.
“Mama, please, don’t struggle like this—let us give you your shot, please, darling? It will make you feel better, Mama, really it will … it will let you rest, Mama! You’re so tired, dear … please don’t fight us like this!”
Marilisa is genuinely annoyed. She has spent a lifetime making allowances for them, reminding herself that they do what they do with the best of intentions, out of ignorance rather than malice, but it seems to her that there has to be a limit to it somewhere. She is not tired. She is not tired at all. She didn’t need the cashmere sweaters; she doesn’t need rest. In her frustration, her hands begin trembling and the braid of light slips out of her fingers. Not only the new strand, the one that reminds her of mother-of-pearl, but the sextuple braid she had been trying to fit it into. Both gone, swinging away from her, out of her reach. Furious, she shoves fiercely at her daughters and her son, and she hears them sighing the long heavy sighs of the overburdened. Damn them! How dare they! And she feels the icy spray of the drug on her bare throat.
She does cry, then. She is tired, then. She lets her head fall forward, and she cries.
They are saying, “Please don’t cry, darling. Please. It’s going to be all right, we promise you. Don’t cry, sweetheart!”
Sweetheart. Sweetheart!
Who will deliver me from this? Marilisa wonders. Isn’t there anybody in charge?
HISTORICAL ROMANCES???
AT THIS TIME OF DAY???
WHERE DID THIS COME FROM, FOR HEAVEN’S SAKES?
B O R I N G !
CHANGE THE CHANNEL!
Keekeen is four years old. She stands with her whole body flattened against the wall (she is so tiny that she can fit between the ribs that section the ceramic sphere’s walls into narrow segments) and she watches the tornadoes. She particularly likes the way their tails seem to be crossing over each other, like kite tails; she particularly fancies the rare lavender ones.
“Nuvver one!” she says, clapping her hands against the transparent surface, dancing up and down on her toes. “Nuvver one, nuvver one!” On the horizon, stretching off toward the broad lakes, the tornadoes are playing, and she is quite right. Nuvver one, nuvver one. There are, in fact, six tornadoes to be seen between the house and the lakes.
The tornadoes of Horsewhispering are not like the tornadoes of Old Earth. Terran tornadoes are called by misery that has reached a critical mass and is sending out a chord they respond to; they whirl down on a place suddenly, and they don’t often visit it again. The tornadoes of Horsewhispering are more like the rain in a place where rain falls every day. Keekeen sees dozens of tornadoes every day, and it amazes her brothers tha
t she doesn’t get bored with them.
“Nuvver one!” shouts Keekeen. “Nuvver big one!” And then she shrieks, absolutely delighted, as the wallspider whips out a broad swath of porous membrane and lashes her to the nearest rib. She has time only to shout “Got Keekeen!” and feel the house roll over sharply as the tornado’s tail dips groundward, and then the spider senses the end of contact, retracts the membrane, and sets her loose again, breathless and crowing, on the floor.
The intercom crackles and they hear their father ask, “You kids okay in there?”
“Yeah, Dad,” says Brahklin, “we’re fine. It didn’t amount to anything.” Beside him, Jordo nods his head, agreeing; Jordo leaves much of the talking to Brahklin and Keekeen.
“Just checking!” says the voice, and the chime rings for disconnect before they can leap in and ask him to bring something or other for dinner; their father is wise in their ways.
“Twice this week,” says Jordo.
“I wish it would let up so we could go to Beridel for a while.”
Jordo is silent; he doesn’t like their grandmother’s house, and if a couple of tornadoes a week will fend off the visit he’s glad to have them.
“Hey, come on,” Brahklin says, “don’t you want to get out of here for a while?”
Jordo looks at his brother and shrugs his shoulders; against the wall, Keekeen cries “Nuvver one!” again. She is certainly no trouble to anybody, he thinks.
“Nah! I mean it, Jordo!” Brahklin persists. “You’ve gotta be tired of hanging around here all the time!”
“There’s the virtuals,” Jordo mutters.
“It’s not the same!”
“Right. With the virtuals you don’t get killed.”
If his mother had been there, she would have seconded that. Two or three thousand people a year died traveling the surface of Horsewhispering in the ceramic spheres that slid along the travelgrids, dodging each other and whirling clouds; she was determined that her children would not become statistics, and she rarely allowed them to leave the house.
“But you know all the time they’re not real, Jordo,” Brahklin objects.
“Not if you cooperate.”
“I cooperate.”
“You don’t. You fight them.”
It’s true. Brahklin is so determined not to be convinced by the computer’s simulated realities that he talks to himself the whole time about their obvious flaws; there’s no way his brain can perform its task of filling in the missing bits and pieces against such resistance.
“Well, you’re a coward, Jordo,” he says sullenly. “Mom and Dad don’t want us to go anyway, and if you always say you’d rather stay here, I’ll never get to go!”
Most of that is stupid, and Jordo ignores it; Brahklin hits him in the shoulder with one angry fist, and he ignores that, too. But it scares Keekeen into big-eyed silence. The little girl pops her thumb in her mouth and watches them warily, hugging the sphere’s wall. She doesn’t think Jordo will let Brahklin hit her, but she’s not sure. Sometimes the boys bump into her, roughhousing; maybe Brahklin might hit her, and maybe Jordo wouldn’t be able to stop him. She’s just not sure. She is learning to pay careful attention to her brothers’ body language, learning to spot the signals that mean they’re angry. She is much more afraid of the two big boys than she is of the tornadoes, but she is going to have to protect herself from the boys.
“Hey, Keekeen!” Jordo says, grinning at her. “Hey! It’s okay, littlest! Really.”
Keekeen smiles at him, but she doesn’t turn her back. Not yet.
Brahklin has forgotten that he was angry. He asks, “How come you don’t like Beridel, Jordo? There’s a lot more room in a triplesphere, we can do stuff! Remember last time? Remember, we played basketball?”
“I remember.”
“Well? Wasn’t it better than the virtuals?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“If you go to Beridel, you have to spend time with Grandmother,” Jordo said.
“So?”
“So I don’t like to listen to her.”
“Oh. All the stuff about Earth.”
“Right. It’s embarrassing.”
Their grandmother is deeply prejudiced against Earth and all things Terran. She calls the people of Earth “Terroes”; she says she’ll be delighted if every last one of them gets wiped out by the Icehouse Effect. She was one of the staunchest supporters when the colonial governments decided to stop the expensive and seemingly futile rescue attempts, leaving Earth’s citizens to die or survive on their own; she did not share the sorrow many people (including her own daughter and her son-in-law) felt about it. Their last visit, the one when they’d played basketball, had ended when their mother had stood up and told their grandmother that she was disgusting.
“You gloat over their suffering, Mother!” she had said, talking through her fingers that were clapped over her mouth. “That’s sick!”
“They deserve to suffer,” Grandmother Clark had retorted, her face twisted and ugly with contempt. “They’re nothing but animals. The sooner they’re all dead, the better for humankind. You are a sentimental woman, and you are exceedingly ignorant of history.”
They had gone home that minute, right in the middle of the afternoon, at the most dangerous travel time of all.
“I don’t care,” their mother had said. “I couldn’t have stayed there. I won’t go back.” And she had started to cry. “I am so ashamed of your grandmother!” she had said, almost whispering. “I am so sorry you heard her …”
“Jordo? Hey, Jordo Clown? Are you here, or what?”
Keekeen observes that the boys have forgotten all about her, and that neither one of them is angry anymore, and she relaxes; it’s okay now for her to look out through the wall toward the lakes, where the windcreatures she loves are still to be seen, high in the air, sailing across the water in long swoops and banks and leaps. She turns around and pats the wall gently on the transparency stud, and her window grows larger. Now she can look out and down across the fields in three directions; only the far wall, the one her father would watch her through from his office, is still opaque.
“Nuvver one!” she says happily. “Nuvver nuvver one!”
ENOUGH …….
TURN IT OFF, PLEASE.
PART THREE
WHAT THE THIRD TRANCER SAID
We thought, fools that we were, that it was all over. All the crime, all the violence, all the poverty, all the basic wickedness of humankind. During the two hundred years when we could end every frustration by simply moving on—to yet one more planet, yet one more asteroid—we thought we had it solved. In our arrogance we even set aside planets dedicated to specific varieties of wickedness, so that those who wished to devote their lives to evil had them as convenient havens shared only by others of like mind. But we had forgotten three important facts. That humans are not gods. That history always repeats itself, though it may take a very long time. And that the day would inevitably come when there were no more frontiers to move to and no more empty planets waiting for us. Nowhere left to ship those who disturbed the rest of us, to spare us the nuisance of having them among us. That time did come, has come; because there were so many of us to hurry it along, it came amazingly quickly. And now we have it all back again … and we have no more idea how to deal with it than our ancestors did. God help us all.
(Christopher Mbona Weatherford, “Introduction to the Taxonomy of Sin”; Occasional Papers In Metatheology 43:11, page 11)
The Vice President had always known, from his earliest childhood, that it was his destiny to save at least the nation, probably the planet and all its colonies, and perhaps the entire solar system. He had waited patiently to learn what form this exercise of his talents would take. Now, staring in amazement at his weeping, shuddering President, he realized that the moment had come at last. This was it. This was what he had been waiting for all his life. He had to admit that it wasn’t exactly as he’d thought it would be; he w
ould have preferred something more dignified … something loftier. Saving some child, absolutely crucial to humanity, from a burning building, perhaps. Leading a battle charge that liberated a helpless people from a brutal dictator. That sort of thing. But the choice was not his to make, it was Almighty God’s, and he was not about to argue with the Lord.
Still, he was taken aback by the image that had just been presented to him: the image of the President—this stodgy, conservative, solid, boring, aging family man, plodding along through his fifth term—coupling in erotic frenzy on the floor of the Oval Office with his equally stodgy secretary. It was hard to accept.
He knew it had to be true; the utter misery of the man across from him gave unequivocal testimony to that. But every time he tried to focus his mind’s eye on it … especially as it would have looked from above to anyone who had happened to walk in on the scene … his mind’s eyelids would snap firmly down and he could not bring himself to look. The President’s rear end, bare to the breeze, his pants down around his ankles? Miss Brown’s long narrow skirts thrown back, and her knobby knees parted to the same breeze?
It was too much; he couldn’t face it. He would settle for just the words, written in decent black block letters on a tasteful white screen in his memory:
THIS MORNING, IN THE MIDDLE OF A LETTER THANKING A MINOR AMBASSADOR TO A MINOR COLONY FOR A MINOR FAVOR, MISS BROWN SUDDENLY STOOD UP AND STRIPPED OFF HER JACKET, BARING MAGNIFICENT BREASTS THE PRESIDENT HAD NEVER SUSPECTED SHE HAD. AND THE NEXT THING HE KNEW, THEY WERE ON THE FLOOR, ON THE PRICELESS RUG, IN FLAGRANTE.
It was sufficiently awful just like that; illustrations were not required.
President Dellwilder moaned again, and the Vice President forced himself not to say any of the things that came to mind. He had already asked how such a thing could possibly have happened, and had been told, “I don’t know, Aron. As God is my witness, I do not know! One minute I was deep in thought, trying to select a perfect phrase, and the next minute I was deep in Miss Brown, right there on that rug! It happened that fast! I swear to God, Aron, I swear to you on my blessed mother’s grave, I do not know how it happened!” The Vice President had had to fight an almost irresistible temptation to ask exactly how deep in Miss Brown. That temptation, and the way the snickering schoolboy question had very nearly come tripping right off his tongue, brought home to him how badly shocked he was. While he fought it, the President told him, without his having to ask, that it had all been over in seconds—that it had all been over, God be praised, before the discreet knock of the Secret Service man bringing their midmorning coffee.
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