The Wine of Violence

by James Morrow

  When Nearth had been found and tamed, though, a different ethic emerged, a fact skirted over in the history books but taught to Francis by his anarchist, misfit father. As opposed to Eden Two, with its highly rationed resources, the new homeland bulged with the sort of free-for-the-grabbing bounty that invites greed, envy, exploitation, profiteering, and politics.

  People found ever more ingenious ways to hate each other. If the venerable irritants of gender and nationality no longer worked, very well, now they’d have segregation by temperament. On one side of civilization stood the Affectives—romantics who declined to distinguish intuition from truth. Their foes were the Rationalists—guardians of intellect, debunkers of illusion, bursters of bubbles. When the Rationalists held political office, enormous sums were spent on industry and technology, and the orphanage down the street went without a new wing. When the Affectives held political office, everyone went out on the lawn and talked to God, and the orphanage down the street went without a new wing. “Smugness kills all utopias,” Francis’s father used to tell his son.

  Like other monuments to science, the Galileo Institute naturally found itself in the Rationalist camp, though many members labored to demonstrate an appreciation for art and, by extension, a distaste for things worldly. Kappie was planning a novel. Francis had published a paper called “The Spirituality of Beanlice.” Luther owned a harp.

  Fewer than five years following the inauguration of Nearth, a teen-age girl was lynched for saying something funny to the leader of a superior-consciousness cult. Shortly thereafter, the planet’s very first jail went up. Its bars were of a new metal called crysanium, mined in unconscionable misery and sold at unprecedented profit.

  In June of 2283, the Nearth Police Academy graduated its first class of willing young law enforcers. They stuffed their bandoliers with artificial-yeast bullets and protected the right of scabs to work the crysanium mines. When a yeastbullet found flesh it began to expand, crushing the recipient from the inside out.

  In Francis’s opinion, one could still make a case for his native planet. All was not thievery and unrest. Throughout its troubles, Nearth maintained a nutty, deuces-wild diversity that afforded everyone an equal opportunity to waste his time.

  The proper word was Fudge.

  Nearth had roller coasters, pool halls, comic strips, trading cards, tap dancing, 3-D kinepix, stand-up comedians, terribly convincing toys, happy surprises in the mail, candy that tasted great but didn’t hurt you, sports played with balls, and Halloween.

  Nearth was unlovable, for it was not of a piece, but it was thoroughly likable, for it had Fudge.

  Fudge was what Francis would miss most if Carlotta the Ghost Planet proved a prison. Fudge and bugs and—

  “STRAP DOWN, CHUMS!”

  Burne’s voice broke uninvited into the middle of Francis’s musings. Realizing that he was in his cabin, Francis moved to the reentry chair, secured his stomach with nyoplene bands, and, by way of keeping Carlotta off his mind, fixed on immediate details. Anatomical drawings of insects crept up the walls, and he had positioned his bunk by the porthole, thus guaranteeing that night, the crystalline night of outer space, would always be the last thing he saw before falling asleep. The reentry chair, unfortunately, faced away from the porthole, so he was now forced to rely on his monitor to tell him where they were. By its account Darwin was slicing through an ugly yellow stratosphere. He braced himself for the landing and prayed to the gods he didn’t believe in that his booty from the voyage, the Cortexclavus areteus specimen, would not perish.

  Battered and old, Darwin was nonetheless a reliable spaceship, with a comforting sort of clunkiness that the drawing-board people had through resolution and humorlessness managed to breed out of the line’s subsequent generations. Guided by a gentle pilot, Darwin would always land on its feet. Burne is an especially gentle pilot, Francis kept telling himself. Burne can land a crate of eggs on a sea of boiling cheese and not make a single omelet.

  The specimen in jeopardy was a beetle, the first living insect ever found on Arete, so beautiful it made Francis hum. Francis fully expected the beetle to bring him fame, fortune, or some mingling of the two. He named it Ollie.

  From Kappie and Burne’s pedestrian perspective, of course, the trip’s achievement was not Ollie but their closeup analysis of Arete’s indigenous population, the third sentient species found thus far in the solar system. The Aretians were not humanoid. Burne surmised they were descended from the small-brained groundslugs of the Jemdetian age. They locomoted by wiggling, and their bodies glistened with slime. They had a culture.

  Burne studied the Aretians’ history while Kappie studied their habits. The scientists took back with them five masks, nine knives, one spear, twenty vases, seven fossil skulls, and three gods. They left a common cold. Luther, meanwhile, chipped away at the planet’s stony skin. He filled the specimen room with rocks and soil samples, carefully labeling each by hand. Luther’s printing was so neat it made people angry.

  Bumps shook Francis out of his prayers. They were regular, careful, subtle bumps. Burne had brought the ship down well.

  Francis freed himself, noting with enormous delight that the magnets were dead. Dancing briefly, luxuriating in the natural gravity, he started to peel off his pressure suit.

  At the open door Luther knocked, then sauntered in as if he hadn’t. He carried an unlit pipe and a black-and-white photograph, and he couldn’t decide which hand should hold which. “Everything’s aces in the specimen room,” he said grandly.

  “I hope that includes Ollie.”

  “He looked healthy to me, son.”

  Francis breathed easy. Good old Burne. “How about it, Luther? Are we going to have trouble refueling?”

  “It’s chancy.” The chemist’s left hand swapped pipe for photograph. “To tell you the truth, I could use a big challenge in my life right now.”

  “Gorst, you bastard, don’t you dare enjoy this.”

  Francis grabbed the photograph. A framework of some kind, badly blurred, was all he could discern. It looked like a bedspring, and he told Luther so.

  “Most of the optical shots were nothing, but then this came through on the last transmission. The camera-to-subject distance was three kilometers, which would make your bedspring about the size of the Galileo Institute.”

  “Which would make it not a bedspring.”

  “I think it’s a rib cage.”

  “What the hell kind of animal has a rib cage the size of the Galileo Institute?”

  “A very memorable animal, son.”

  Francis whisked his finger around the circumference of the porthole. “Luther,” he said, “I want to go home.”

  2

  WHEN FRANCIS LOSTWAX was eight years old, he had his first experience with violence. Occasioning the event was a splendid and locally famous collection of insects that young Francis had caught by his own cunning and mounted in a glass cigar box. Children, being close to the ground, have a special rapport with insects.

  Now this particular collection was coveted by one Robert Poogley, a corrupt child whose various villainies were abetted by a pair of eyes unfailing in their innocence and a pair of parents unshakable in their opinion that Sonny Bob could do no wrong. Robert Poogley had a tubby body, cloudy yellow hair, and thirty-one badly maintained teeth, including two fighting canines he had once tried to file into points. Francis always thought of Robert Poogley as a personified fart.

  One day during recess Robert Poogley waylaid Francis in the woods behind the school and requested the box of insects. If Francis showed up tomorrow without it, Robert Poogley would instruct his German shepherd, Ratdog Snarler, to visit Francis’s home for the purpose of removing Francis’s throat. The next morning a cowering Francis placed the box in his briefcase and went to school, where during topology class he struck up a conversation with Judy Shout and learned to his everlasting relief that Ratdog Snarler’s ferocity was a fiction. If you showed Ratdog Snarler a hologram of a cat, he would t
urn tail and run. If you cornered Ratdog Snarler in the bathroom and switched on a noisy laser toothbrush, he would evacuate his bowels on the linoleum.

  At recess Robert Poogley maneuvered Francis and his briefcase to the swampy side of the woods. It had rained the night before, and the muck was particularly soft and thick, like the surface of a lavishly frosted cake. “They in there?” Robert Poogley asked, pointing to the briefcase with one hand and seizing Francis’s collar with the other.

  Francis surprised himself by getting angry. “Take your abortion tongs off me, you big fart.”

  “You want me to bring my dog over tonight, is that it, Lostwax?”

  “You can’t con me, Poogley. Judy Shout says your dog loses fights with crippled hamsters.”

  At this Robert Poogley became irrational. He hurled Francis to the ground and tried uprooting his hair. Then, as if plugging leaks, Robert Poogley began to stuff vile guck into Francis’s ears and nose. Francis lay embedded in the swamp, howling pitifully, as Robert Poogley rose and located the briefcase. He yanked it open, seized the cigar box, and was the first child in from recess.

  Robert Poogley, insect pirate, grew into a successful holographer with a mustache. His portraits of unspeakably sweet children were displayed in Nearth banks. The portraits fooled everyone but Francis, who looked beyond their iridescent expressions and saw the lust for other people’s moths.

  Francis had by now decided that violence was natural and instinctive to the human species. At the time of the insect robbery, however, he had merely decided that violence was an extremely uncomplicated way to get what you wanted.

  The world’s odd tolerance of fighting cropped up again and again in Francis’s studies of history, particularly ancient history. On Earth, where his remotest forebears lived, a person could be indisputably responsible for the deaths of thousands and still go down in the history books as some sort of great hero. This was before Francis understood the biological inevitability of violence, so he was bewildered. Why, he wanted to know, were the names of Samson, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Ulysses S. Grant, and Julius Caesar not obscenities, spoken after dark in whispers of revulsion and shame? The same teachers who couldn’t bring themselves to say shitbrain or ortwaddle openly discussed Alexander the Great.

  He never found anyone who had the answer. Until he got to Planet Carlotta, he never even found anyone who had the question.

  FRANCIS ENTERED BIOLOGY not because of his insects but because of his father. A Gammaday afternoon found the two of them walking the family dog, a tense collie named Alice. The boy noticed that Alice would not urinate on a tree or lamppost until she had sniffed first. Urine was something Francis thought about often in those days, for he had recently been diagnosed as diabetic. (The ancient Terran Greeks knew that when you had diabetes, honey bees fell in love with your urine; it was to this phenomenon that Francis traced his lifelong fascination with insects.) The word diabetes charmed young Francis. It sounded to him less like a disease than the name of some magical planet in another galaxy.

  “Why does she sniff first, Dad?”

  “Dogs don’t urinate unless they know that another dog has already been there,” his father said, stabbing at an explanation. He was a good-hearted man whose blankest expression looked like a smile.

  “But what about the very first dog in the world,” Francis asked, “the one who came before all the other dogs on Earth? What did he do? How was he ever able to pee?”

  “You ask the right questions, Francis. That’s the mark of a scientist. Why not become a scientist?”

  “Okay,” said Francis. He never did find out about the very first dog in the world.

  NEARTH CONTINUED TO CIRCLE its sun, measuring out the years, and the blessings of adulthood fell upon Francis. Now he could: stay up late, spoil his appetite, spill his milk, bolt his food, lose his socks, not look it up, dislike his relatives, and wax nostalgic. He became an entomologist.

  A part-time teaching position at the Galileo Institute gave Francis a reliable income and enough hours in his day to pursue a pet notion, the spirituality of beanlice. But he was never assigned to lecture in the great amphitheater, which had a computerized atmosphere and oak bookshelves containing simulated first editions of On the Origin of Species and Newton’s Principia. Francis was a mere permanent visiting professor, and he was told to take a conventional room with too many windows and like it. He was also given an office, the size of which in his estimation hovered between a large birdhouse and a small tree fort.

  In Entomology 101 Francis lectured about the indigenous insects of Nearth, notably the snow beetle, the harlot fly, the swamp aphid, and the gorgathon, which was not really an insect for the same fussy reasons that a spider was not one either. He lectured about the insects imported on Eden Two, ants and bees and a thousand other kinds, including species made extinct by flaws in the ark’s ecology: Mantis religiosa, which, like humans, had managed to accommodate preying and praying, and Photuris pennsylvanica, whose luminosity now seemed as fanciful as the unicorn’s horn. He even lectured about the beetles that could conceivably inhabit Planets Verne and Arete and Kritonia, though none had been discovered yet.

  Francis’s most tantalizing student was Luli Verdegast. While the class gazed through the surfeit of windows, Francis gazed at Luli. She was the prettiest creature he had ever seen outside of his moths.

  Luli was at the institute to become a psychologist, was broadening herself by learning about bugs. Francis started accompanying Luli to dinner, and one night, after drinking a whole half-bottle of wine, he asked her to marry him. Luli, who knew Francis had atypical integrity and terrific curly hair, agreed.

  It was not a marriage to buy shares in. Luli turned out to be uncompromising and brilliant. She could prosecute honey before a jury of bears and win. Francis, who was intelligent and dedicated but not brilliant, soon became an object of Luli’s scorn. They quarreled as a matter of routine, with Francis always at a loss for words of the mordant sort Luli was forever finding.

  In physical pursuits Luli was considerably less passionate. Her idea of a good time in bed was breakfast. Nevertheless, shortly after their first anniversary they found themselves in possession of a pregnancy, which Francis named Bugs, followed by a child, whom Luli named Barry.

  Francis loved Barry’s freckled face and odd little cartoon-character voice. He took Barry to the kinepix, played backgammon whenever Barry asked, and bought Barry treats, such as a wonderful android rabbit. Barry thought his daddy was the greatest thing going.

  When Barry was seven, a message reached the Galileo Institute that Francis Lostwax’s son was lying unconscious in the emergency room of Qualamy Hospital. Francis left Entomology 101 in the middle of a sentence.

  A nurse led him down a sullen corridor to the end room. The room was dark. Drapes hung like wet hair across the windows. Barry was in bed, soundless and still, so encumbered with tubes and wires he looked like a marionette.

  “Barry, this is your father!”

  “Ssshhhhh,” said the nurse. She had a dopey, uncomplicated face, the kind people draw inside circles.

  Francis became livid. “Are you afraid I might wake him up? Barry! It’s Daddy!” Barry did not wake up.

  A brisk, stumpy woman entered, identified herself as Dr. Alexander, and, declaring Barry mildly comatose, asked for Francis’s own medical history. Francis explained that he was a childhood diabetic.

  In an advanced civilization such as Francis’s, of course, childhood diabetics would normally be considered anachronisms. Indeed, metabolic-feedback amplifiers and other ingenuities had virtually eradicated the disease from the old, Terran society. But when it came to recapitulating the whole of scientific medicine on Nearth, certain priorities naturally emerged, with the squeaky wheels getting the grease. Thus, the really lurid and operatic killers—cancer, arteriosclerosis, screaming bonegrows—soon found themselves confronted with state-of-the-art techniques. Cures. Meanwhile, diabetes—boring, second-string diabetes—was accorded
an antique, twentieth-century approach. Shortly after his eighth birthday, Francis had an artificial pancreas implanted in tandem with his real one; he was then obliged to take quarterly injections of supplementary insulin. Although Francis never fully adjusted to the idea of puncturing himself, his affliction did not prove debilitating, and it rarely disrupted his thoughts. Now, without warning, foiled by the plastic behind Francis’s navel, the disease was avenging itself through Francis’s genes.

  Dr. Alexander snapped up the nearest videophone transmitter and ordered a supply of regular insulin sent to the room. She informed the dopey-faced nurse precisely how much to give the boy, fifteen units, then bustled out the door. When the insulin came, the nurse methodically filled the syringe with 150 units.

  “You’re giving him too much!” Francis protested.

  As if Francis had said nothing, were not there, the nurse pinched the skin on Barry’s arm, drew back the plunger, and, ascertaining that she had not hit a vein, delivered the overdose. Thirty minutes after the injection, the boy had traveled all the way from manageable diabetic coma to profound and tremorous insulin shock. Compensatory glucose was pumped into Barry, but the convulsions did not subside. Within two hours he was dead.

  A shrill whimper leaped from Francis’s innermost place. He was aware of bringing his fists down on the nurse, pounding her through his tears. A robust orderly entered the room, separated the shaken bodies, and held Francis flopping against the wall while the nurse made a wise exit. When Dr. Alexander arrived, she covered Barry’s body with a sheet that smelled like cheese.

  Thus ended Francis Lostwax’s second experience with violence.

  FOR FIVE DAYS Francis did not report to the Galileo Institute. He stayed in a broken chair, swallowed corrosive quantities of gin, and fingered books without reading them. There are widows, widowers, and orphans, but there is no word for a father who has lost a son. Some things, he decided, are not fit for words.