Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  But she tells the twins it could be a lot worse. “You could be on Gehenna,” she reminds them, “serving as targets for the teenagers in the Games. You could be on Polytrix, working in the mines they won’t send robots into because robots are too valuable to risk that way. You could have been born on Eden, you know—your father’s grandmother was a Square Corner Fundamentalist, and if she’d had her way that’s exactly where you’d be!”

  This is a lie; Miktok knows nothing at all about their father’s family. For all she knows, Flesser Fitzgerald sprang fullgrown from the stinking pavement of the alley where the twins were conceived. But it’s quite safe to tell Martha and Tommy the lie, since they know no more about him than she does. Miktok has found the fabled fundamentalist greatgrandmother extremely useful over the years. “And you could be stuck in one of our famous swarming filthy cities, instead of here in Jerrenton,” she goes on. “You could be living in Birog City. Remember that!”

  “I’d rather … lots rather … be in Birog City!” Martha snaps at her. Martha is naked except for two strategically placed blue silk scarves; that saves on clothes and helps them get by. She is as scrawny as a killbird chick, and as ugly. Miktok is grateful for that ugliness, which will perhaps protect her daughter just a little, and she nourishes it carefully. The little girl’s face is screwed up into a freckled knot; her hands are shoved deep into the tangled mop of carrot-red hair. This is a conversation they’ve had a hundred times, and Martha is only nine. Miktok wonders how many thousands of times she will have to go through it before the twins either give up and accept the fact that they are, like it or not, Birogians—and suburbanites—or figure out some way to go off into the various worlds and seek their fortunes.

  “If we lived in Birog City, at least there’d be something to do!” Martha wails, pounding her fists on her flat little chest, which offers no resonance at all for the pounding. It sounds like cheap sandals on a plastic walk. “At least we could go out sometimes instead of spending our whole lives inside a stupid apartpod!” And it is true. The twins have been outside only half a dozen times in the seven years they’ve lived here. But that is the way things are. For everybody except the very wealthy.

  Miktok doesn’t understand why they aren’t used to it. If you have always stayed inside, why would you want to go outside? It seems to her that the twins should feel the same way about being outdoors as about being at the bottom of the sea … it should be the Dread Unknown for them.

  “Sure,” Miktok says, narrowing her eyes at Martha, measuring the frantic body and words and deciding that it’s the usual act and not something new to be worried about. Miktok remembers quite well what it was like to “go out” in Birog City; of the elevenpack she ran with, she is the only one who survived their goings-out. “Sure you could go out! And you might live to be fourteen, if you were very, very lucky.”

  “This,” Tommy announces dramatically, stepping right in front of his sister to claim Miktok’s attention, flinging his arms wide to indicate the broad scope of his description, “is not life. This is not living. We’d rather die young and know we’ve lived!” The scarf wrapped carelessly around Tommy’s loins … can a nine-year-old boy have loins? … is a deep yellow color, like butter. What is ugly in Martha is dangerously attractive in Tommy; redheaded boys are all the rage on Birog this year. And he is as aware of that as Miktok is. He plans to be a threedy star when he grows up.

  Miktok stares at them, frustrated, ready to smack them both (although she would not really do that, but she is ready to think about doing it). The two of them. Born during a silly fad of naming your kids for ancient Terran politicians and their families … she is sorry now that her children are Thomas Jefferson Fitzgerald and Martha Washington Fitzgerald. She is sick of watching the threedies about the first Thomas Jefferson and the first Martha Washington, pious and frugal and wise and forever going outside; the twins play them over and over and over again till Miktok could scream. Why couldn’t she have given them ordinary names like Clarm and Geyra … or Miktok and Flesser?

  Flesser. Beloved. His arms burning, the fire licking along the edges of his hands, looking at her with such surprise, such complete astonishment, because he had been sure the place was safe … Flesser ordering her to leave him there, because she is pregnant. Flesser shoving her, using the insides of his bent wrists, where the flames haven’t caught yet. Miktok still cannot think about Flesser without pain, and that makes her voice sharp.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are, you rotten little beasts!” she hisses. “And you’re twins, too! You always have somebody around to talk to and do things with, somebody you get along with! Two weeks in the Birog City streets would make you into fundamentalists, praising God for the miracles of good luck you’ve been gifted with—if you lasted two weeks! Shame on you! Stop complaining! Go watch the threedies!”

  Martha sighs deeply, and smooths back her hair from the high white forehead Miktok will not soften with bangs with both small hands. “Mothers who really love their children,” she offers, “don’t always dump them by the comset to watch the stupid threedies!”

  “Oh,” says Miktok. “Really. Well, Martha Washington, what do mothers do? Mothers that really love their kids, I mean, as opposed to mothers like me.”

  Martha has no idea, of course. She’s never been around any other mothers, and she has brains enough to know that the ones she sees in the school threedies on the mass-ed programs are fantasy mothers. She has to settle for her most snobbish expression, the one that says she is far too refined and intellectual even to stoop to discussing the subject. She has her hands firmly planted on what will one day be her hips.

  Tommy breaks in then, before Miktok can tell her daughter what she thinks of her performance.

  “Mother,” he says, “you know what T.O. says about the threedies?”

  T.O. is Tommy’s APCP—his Assigned Peer Call-Partner. Thirty minutes a day on the phone with T.O. is supposed to help socialize them both. Like Tommy, T.O. is nine; unlike Tommy, he has a father resident, living in his home. Miktok hates T.O. He is a whiny and cruel little boy, fiercely dedicated to making every call an occasion for reducing Thomas to tears. But the government has paired the boys off and there is nothing she can do about it. She has filled out an application for APCP reassignment every month for the past three years. They go into the comset and come straight back stamped DENIED, every single time.

  “What?” she asks. “What does T.O. say?”

  “He says the Galaxy Twelve series is true stuff, Mama!”

  “Don’t call me ‘mama.’”

  “Mother, I mean. He says the government just doesn’t want us to know!”

  “Galaxy Twelve?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The one where the giant aliens fly over Washington flapping their flaming wings? The one where—”

  “Wait!” Thomas protested. “T.O.’s not stupid. I mean, you can see where they’ve seamed in the special effects and stuff. But he says that the boring parts … all the stuff where you’ve got the Aliens behind a big window, and you’ve got a linguist in a terpreter booth, and they talk about—”

  “Interpreter booth, Tommo!” says Martha. She is still sneering, but she aims it at her brother this time. “‘Terpreter’ booth! Honestly!”

  Tommy turns on her and demands to know if she can explain what a terpreter booth is, and Martha admits at once that she can’t, but points out that she can at least pronounce it. It’s clear to Miktok that they’re going to occupy each other for a while with this, which will save her from having to tell them again not to believe everything they hear.

  It seems to Miktok that these two children of hers, whose sophistication sometimes frightens her, ought to be able to set aside the rantings and ravings of T.O. Delareska, but it’s a rare week when she escapes a hushed account of his latest wild imaginings. Martha has no APCP, there being an adult female in the house to serve her as a role model, and Miktok is glad of that. One uncontrollable source of input
into her home is more than enough.

  She thinks she is going to be able to get back to her housework … she has to figure out some way to make two chops serve three people for their dinner, and there is something awful growing on the bathroom floor again that she has to call the extension service for advice about. But Tommy surprises her. He cuts off his argument with his sister, patting Martha distractedly on the back by way of apology, and insists on knowing Miktok’s opinion about what T.O. says. After all, he says, there really were linguists; they appear in the mass-ed history course several times. Maybe there really were Aliens, too. Maybe—

  “Tommy,” says Miktok gently, “you know better. You know those are science fiction threedies. You know there were never really Aliens living on Earth!” She hopes. It makes her skin creep, just hearing about it. And of course she has heard the rumors, just like T.O.’s parents have heard them, and apparently discussed them in front of their child. Miktok has a sudden happy thought. If T.O.’s parents are the kind of kookoes that believe in Aliens coming to Earth and a government cover-up and all the rest of that, then maybe there’s a chance she can get a new Assigned Peer for Tommy! This is well worth investigating.

  “Tommy, honey,” she says, holding his eyes with hers, putting her hands on his shoulders to show him she’s serious, “tell me. Tell me exactly what T.O. says. And how he says he knows all these interesting things.”

  Tommy pulls away from her, incensed at being treated like a child, and—

  B O R I N G !

  CHANGE CHANNELS!

  The judge is sick at heart; his long thin fingers travel aimlessly over his splendid robes with their narrow purple and lavender stripes, now touching his chest, now a shoulder, now moving down over an arm … they are like skinny insects moving. The judge seems to be unaware of what his fingers are doing.

  He hasn’t eaten this morning, nor will he eat this day; he never eats on torture days. It seems to him unspeakably obscene that anyone could cause another human to suffer agony and, on the same day, feed himself. He will take a little water; nothing more.

  In another ten minutes it will be time for him to go into the little cubicle where the torture takes place. And it will be like it always is. He will sit down beside the table where the prisoner lies waiting for him. The prisoner will be motionless because of the net of energy fields that restrains him, but his eyes will be moving; their eyes are always dancing, frantic, trying to get away for the sake of the terrified body. The judge will sit down beside the prisoner and he will say the prayer he always says: “Merciful Lord, guide me in this work, and guide this man that he may profit by it, Amen.” And then he will give the prisoner the injections.

  There are two injections. The first paralyzes the vocal tract, so that there will be no screams, no moans, not even whimpering, during the torture. The second administers one hour of the fiercest pain this young world’s scientists can devise; it is, they tell him, a whole-body pain. Unlike traditional tortures, which tend to focus on one body part or perhaps two or three, there is no part of the prisoner’s body that does not feel the unrelenting agony. Except, of course, the heart. The prisoner’s heart is given a constant mix of other drugs during the session, to exempt it from the pain and keep it beating, even as the prisoner’s body and mind beg only for it to stop and grant the peace of death.

  The judge will not do what he longs to do after he has given the injections. Unlike other judges who have filled this post, he will not get up and go away and come back in an hour, when the torture is over. He will sit beside the prisoner for the entire hour, holding the man’s hand, tears pouring down over his cheeks and falling from time to time on the man’s suffering flesh, and he will explain.

  “My friend,” he will say, as it goes on and on and the eyes talk to him about what it is like to lie silent and motionless through pain like that, “I want you to understand why this is being done to you. I want you to know that this pain has purpose.

  “You were brought here to this place,” he will say, while the prisoner tries to die, and fails, “because you have tortured another human being. This procedure, this process that you are undergoing now, is administered only to torturers. Please understand that.

  “There are those who would tell you that you are an evil man,” he will say, “and that this is a suitable punishment for such evil. I want you to know that it is not punishment at all. If I wanted only to punish you, this is not what I would do. I know that you are not evil, my friend. And I know that when you understand what torture is, when you truly know how it feels to suffer the kind of pain that you inflict on others, you will not do it. Not ever again. I understand that.

  “The point of this procedure,” he will say, “is to show you what it is like, so that you will understand. There is no other way, no other way but this terrible one that breaks my heart, that breaks all our hearts, to make you understand. We know that. Because everything else has been tried, since the beginning of time, and the torturers have gone out and been torturers still.”

  And he will say to the prisoner: “Please know, my friend, that I would love you if I could. It is my own shortcoming that a man who is a torturer is a man I am unable to love. But although I cannot love you, I can feel regard for you. I can feel sympathy for you. I can wish a better life for you. And when this is over, I can rejoice that you will go away from this place a different man—a man to whom the idea of torture is as unthinkable as it is to any normal human being.

  “You will be cured,” the judge will say, as he always says. “It will all be over. You will once again be a member of the human race.”

  The judge is so squeamish about others’ pain that he cannot bear to visit a friend in a hospital. He thinks sometimes of the dolorics, who are born unable to shut out pain from any living creature, born to a life of total isolation inside a shielded psi-bubble, or to the life of total filth that falls to the painprostitutes of Gehenna. He can think of nothing more terrible; he is sure he would go mad, in their place. He has tried all his adult life, but it remains incomprehensible to him: how could any human being be indifferent to another human being’s agony, or, most repulsive of all, enjoy another human being’s agony? It is the Mystery of All Mysteries; it always has been.

  With some mysterious things there is at least a thread of meaning that can be grasped. If only by the grace of metaphor, there is a way to say, “I could not do that myself, but I can understand how someone could do it.” Not with torture. Torture is different. There are no metaphors for torture.

  When one of the judge’s sons had been injured in a flyer crash and required various repairs, he could not go to the beloved boy’s side; he had to send his wife. He sat home and waited, motionless as a prisoner in a restraint net, until she came to tell him that the pain was over. No one will ever know what it is like for him, administering the injections to these prisoners and staying with them through the torment, until it is over. No one. Only his knowledge that it means they will not hurt other people anymore gives him the strength it takes.

  And he knows very well that if it were not for the first injection—the one that imposes silence—even that knowledge would not be enough. Not if the prisoner could give voice to the pain. He gives thanks for the first injection. And for the fact that, so far, he has never gone into the torture room and found a prisoner there who was a woman. Perhaps that will never happen; there is no record of it ever happening on this world; he prays that it will never happen.

  He will go into the cubicle this morning and do what must be done, as he always has; it will be like it always is. He knows that no man could commit torture if he knew what his victim was feeling; it is just a matter of making it absolutely clear. It is a process of education, nothing more, and it must be done.

  Except that this time it is not like it always is.

  This time, when he leans over the prisoner to administer the two drugs, it is not the same. Because this time he recognizes the man who lies there with only his eyes trying d
esperately to run away from the agony that is coming. This man has been on the torture table before, has had the injections before … the judge remembers this man.

  The judge sets down his instruments without a word. For a moment he looks into the terrified eyes, and then he turns his back and walks away.

  There is another cubicle in this facility of the Justice Department. The cubicle has no floor, and no proper door; it has a small square panel that covers an opening shaped to receive the tidy bundles of daily trash. A fat human being would not be able to fit through the opening, but the judge is thin. With almost no trouble at all, he slides the panel back and climbs into the opening. He makes not one sound, although he has had no injection to paralyze his vocal tract, as he falls toward the vaporizer.

  HORRIBLE!

  WHERE DO THEY GET THIS STUFF?

  CHANGE THE CHANNEL!

  The great paddlewheel that turns at the rear of the riverboat is made of a silvery filament as strong as steel. The wheel is taller than a house, and the lacy circle it spreads against the background of space is lovely to see. It is, of course, as ridiculous as it is beautiful, and as useless as the lacy ornaments that loop and festoon the railings and posts and windows. The seas of space offer the wheel nothing to push against. It is the drive hidden in the boat’s belly that moves the craft toward its various destinations. This has its advantages.

  If the paddlewheel had to be functional, there would be many constraints on its shape and size and design. Since it need not be, it can be made as intricate and as splendid as the owner chooses, and the only constraint is that it must not be made in such a way that it becomes a sail and interferes with the drive. (There is also the constraint that the riverboat’s owner must have money enough to pay for it; but that comes from a different class of constraints.)