by James Morrow
“And so you ban technology from everyday life.”
She took the teapot, released an amber stream into her cup. “Exactly. Something forbidden is not forgotten, not thrown away. It takes up new residence in the parlors of imagination. It strikes awe. People want it.”
“But the holojectors break down, of course. So you need a clergy.”
“With a soldering iron for a crosier.”
Francis took his knife and wounded a melon. “What if a Quetzalian hasn’t bottled up any hostilities during a particular opoch?”
“That never happens. Look at your own life. There’s always something. I’m riling you right now. Often our wildest dreams spring from annoyances. The Runner Bureau sends you a note saying they’re going to deliver a large package, but you’ve got to be there to sign for it, so you waste a warm afternoon and they never come. I once bit a bureau administrator’s thumb off.”
“Yech.”
“And ate it.”
Again, cascades of silence from Francis. Finally, he swallowed a morsel of melon and spoke. “Aren’t you going to be late for work?”
“I’d rather be late if I can get you to understand.” She lifted her teacup and settled into a lipocawool chair. “I ought to tell you the whole story, beginning before the wall or Zolmec or anything.”
“I want to understand,” said Francis in the warmest voice he had used that day. “I’ll listen.”
He found an egg, fried it, put it on his plate. He forgot to eat it.
THE STORY TEZ TOLD began with a question. “If certain individuals were never born, would the world be something else?” Certainly Eden Three, the world of Tez’s ancestors, would have been something else were The Teller never born.
He came into a civilization much like that on the sister ark, which is to say it was Earth in facsimile. Eden Three had barbershops and bowling alleys, taco stands and plastic parks, dried figs and cotton candy. It was a bland and tidy world—and it was just. Through three generations the commitment to tolerance never slipped. Relativism was the only creed in town. In the fourth generation The Teller appeared, fanatically preaching the divinity of the human brain, and nobody had any idea what to do about him.
According to myth, The Teller’s mother, a fueler of reactors, bore him in an engine room, and several decades after his death pilgrims began visiting the defunct atomic furnace that tradition called his cradle. As a boy he learned from his parents the indispensable art of feeding the ark’s engines. As an adolescent he had visions. By his thirtieth birthday he boasted political savvy sufficient to make his visions the state religion of Eden Three.
Like most visionaries, The Teller saw the distant future with optical-glass clarity, the intermediate future with beeswax clarity, and the immediate future with the clarity of dark glasses dipped in tar. In the distant future he saw a New Earth convulsed by riot, a New Earth where selfishness was the principal thing people believed in and where thousands suffered pointlessly from guns and hunger. And he saw that, to avoid an identical destiny, the Eden Three colony must make aggression as extinct as trilobites. What he could not see were the decades right after his death, when his ideas would be disfigured beyond recognition by a significant percentage of his followers, the insidious Cult of the Brain Eaters. Perhaps it was fortunate that these horrors were hidden from him. He might have capitulated to despair and never shown the world a way to peace.
The Teller taught that the human brain is a miracle, a sacred machine whose potential lies beyond its own comprehension. One doesn’t use holy water to drown people or holy grails to bludgeon them, and when it comes to holy organs only benign actions are allowed.
He never bothered to get practical about any of this until he was dying. To his disciples he outlined his theory that the brain’s inclinations toward evil might be periodically dampened through orgies of unrestrained but harmless violence. A holojector, rewired to accept neurological inputs and connected to a special transpervium screen, could give these fantasies an existence so tangible they would live outside the body—viable, pulsing, and able to be flushed away.
Foreseeing the vulnerability that the new machines would bring, The Teller declared that Eden Three must not land on the lushest planet, the fourth captive, the plum: that’s where the sister ship would go. Instead they must enter the asteroid belt and find “a small blind sphere, sucking up the sun.” They must orbit it until they saw the clouds part. “It is Luta. It is home.”
The Teller died, and a hundred attempts to implement his dream followed. The common denominator was failure. Nobody could figure out how to get a holojector, which normally issued only light, to function in terms of biochemical bits. And since the electrodes were not implanted but merely pasted on the head—brain surgery was still a radical resort—the mental outputs remained too weak and undifferentiated to produce pictures that were viable, disposable, or even very entertaining.
Yet the Tellerists did not abandon the quest. They saw victory as a matter of more time, more luck.
Events took a particularly awful turn with the rise of the Brain Eaters. Probably their advent was inevitable. The Teller had been gone for fifty standard years, and in that time his teachings were interpreted and distorted by fifty lesser minds. The Brain Eaters represented an extreme, of course, a minority driven mad by the infinite claustrophobia of ark life. “So human brains are divine?” these twisted thugs reasoned. “Then eating them will make us gods!”
On the day Eden Three entered the UW Canis Majoris system, civil war broke out. Pitched battles were fought in the engine rooms and greenhouses. Janet Vij got her ten-year-old hand shot off. Tellerist murdered Brain Eater and Brain Eater murdered Tellerist while the eyes of science went bloodshot seeking a technology for beneficence.
There came a dark body, small for a planet, large for an asteroid, and when the Tellerists saw the gap in its clouds they knew this was Luta. Eden Three landed on scorching sand. Life in the promised land was evidently not going to be a picnic, and hostilities flared hotter than ever.
Still in the majority, the Tellerists scattered their enemy to a huge eastern oasis. Then, suddenly, the Brain Eaters counterattacked, dealing Tez’s ancestors a crushing defeat called the Battle of the Singing Rocks. During their long, meandering retreat the Tellerists returned to the ark, stripping it of everything they might need to continue their research: holojectors, transpervium, circuitry, hull plates. They took all the animals.
At last a river appeared. Crossed, it kept the Brain Eaters away long enough for the Tellerists to finish a crude timber defense wall. Behind the wall a great civilization grew. While the Brain Eaters went madder and madder, their devolution accelerated by a cruel, barbaric desert, the Tellerists practiced ecology. They irrigated and cultivated, forcing greenness from the sand. They found a quarry and founded a city. They named themselves Quetzalians—after Quetzalcoatl, the kind, cultured god of the Toltecs, a Terran nation.
According to some histories, the Toltecs gave Earth one of its few antiviolence societies. According to other histories, that idea was bunk, and the Toltecs were as vicious as anybody else. The Quetzalians chose to embrace the bunk.
Further names were devised. Cuz, Aca, Iztac, Tolca, Zolmec.
Zolmec had become possible! First the rise of sophisticated surgical techniques made the human cerebral cortex as accessible as the human toenail. Then Janet Vij, recovered from her wound and grown to womanhood, resolved to try every conceivable synthesis of holovision circuitry, found that human knowledge was inadequate to the task, and invented her own private science, biophotonics.
Vij became Zolmec’s first high priestess. She ordered the timbers ripped down and a great Temple of Tolca built in their place. She ordered the river drained; noctus would fill its bed. The work took years, but finally the world was ready to begin its cycle of, as Tez phrased it, “yearly harvests, opochly sacraments, and daily beatitudes.”
THE WORD beatitudes lingered tangibly, waiting to be blown away by Fra
ncis’s response. None came. He rose from the breakfast table, walked to the window. Autumn was crisping the air. He breathed on the isinglass, watching with satisfaction as the circles opened and closed like mouths. He took his finger and defaced the condensation with a cartoon character.
“Naturally I’m impressed,” he began on tiring of his game. “It would be dishonest of me to claim I’m not moved, awed even, by this heritage. You have proved our potential for nonviolence, and, as you said that day in the operating theater, what else is worth worshiping?”
A mammoth smile divided Tez’s face. “You do understand.”
Francis snorted. “However—and I’m afraid this is a considerable however—something gnaws at me terribly.”
Tez crossed her arms, stuck out her chin. This had better be good, her body said.
“Tez, I’m always ready to embrace artificial solutions for biological problems. I didn’t have to think twice about getting a plastic pancreas. But artificial solutions are not desirable solutions. What kidney patient would not prefer to drop his dialysistem down a grating? Nobody wants that kind of dependency. Circuits fizzle at the wrong time. Nature may not be benign, but she is reliable.”
“Sweet Nearthling, it has been officially estimated by scientists much like yourself that every minute, somewhere in this universe of ours, an advanced civilization reduces itself to radioactive crud. When the stakes are that high, I’ll take my chances on the circuits. You can throw in with Nature.”
“The problem, I think, is that Zolmec…” He had trouble finding words. “I would say that it blunders into the psyche and confuses the proper order of things. You’re not intervening in human affairs, you’re intervening in the soul.”
“Well, it’s tedious waiting for Heaven to do it. When I think of innocent Tellerists cannibalized in the gardens of Eden Three, when I think of Planet Earth, where not a single day went by without a murder, when I think of cruelty—men who impaled other men on meat hooks—then all your righteous ideas about Nature versus artifice start to sound like low-grade primitivistic slop. Will you look me in the eye and say you’d rather be natural than alive?”
“History isn’t all fighting, Tez. The sloppy primitivists get along pretty well.”
“What is artifice, anyway? People build machines, beavers build dams. Are beaver dams unnatural? Forgive me if I’m confusing you with logic.” Satisfied, she sipped tea.
“Very cute, Tez, but the fact remains that you’re in bondage to this technology. It has become an addiction for you.”
“Virtue is not a bad addiction to have, Nearthling.”
“Zolmec siphons off juices that—”
“Zolmec siphons off sludge.”
“It’s perverse!”
“It’s compassionate!”
“It’s playing God!”
“It works!”
Francis returned to the breakfast table. His forsaken egg, sunny-side-up and cold as a moon, glowered at him from its plate. “Strange—all this past opoch I’ve been saying, ‘Maybe I’ll never get myself and my Cortexclavus back to Nearth, and I don’t really care.’ Now I’m not so sure. Quetzalia frightens me.”
Tez finished her tea, left a tear’s worth, plodded to the door. “Our races have been separated for a long time. Perhaps the gap is…” She opened the door and watched a stiff autumn leaf scuttle across the courtyard like a beetle. “I’ll be late tonight. If you have any trouble filling your day, I suggest you meditate on War and Zolmec.”
“Tell me something,” said Francis. “Did you ever…do it to me?”
“Do it?” She started toward the stables.
“You know: dream about me. Did you?”
“No,” she called. “Until recently you had never done anything that hurt me.”
14
FOR THE NEXT TEN DAYS it rained. It rained cats and dogs, buckets and cisterns, testiness and discontent. Indoors, Francis and Tez strained to hold the climate somewhere between hostility and nonchalance, and at times it climbed as high as courtesy. They made love once.
Tez’s puppets became their principal means of communication. Shag, a shy sea serpent with a droopy tongue and a horn, was Francis’s mouthpiece. Tez used Mr. Nose, a clown. The four of them shared the bed. For minor grievances the game worked well. Criticism went down easily when sugared by a piping voice that issued from something small and cute. Francis agreed with Mr. Nose that he had a bad habit of letting his swimming pool acquire scum. Tez conceded Shag’s point about not littering the house with half-drunk glasses of juice. When it came to the Zolmec rift, however, no amount of smallness, no quantity of cuteness, helped. Shag said that Quetzalians were bleeding their souls away, and Tez refused to answer. The closest they came to rapport was when Shag called the Zolmec fantasies “wet dreams” and Mr. Nose replied that they sprang from “holyjectors.”
Outside the bedroom, silence ruled. At night Tez stayed in the library, writing a new play, Laughing Matter, about a planet whose scientists isolate a humor gene that multiplies rampantly and turns everybody into comedians. Jokes begin appearing in unlikely places, such as road signs and theater tickets.
Francis, meanwhile, would walk the courtyard’s graceful portico, rehearsing aloud a lecture on mites and studying the drizzly torch-lit gardens. Raindrops hit the puddles, made targets, always got bull’s-eyes.
Each lover saw in the other an anger that was both just and self-indulgent. Francis knew that Tez felt violated and spied upon, but hadn’t she invited it, with her refusal to tell him earlier how Zolmec worked? Tez knew Francis felt misled, but wasn’t his repulsion proof she had been right to protect him? Like all good friends, they hated seeing their relationship lose its emotional innocence, its chastity of goodwill, and now that the thing was lost, now that searing statements had changed hands and left scars, neither looked forward to the future.
ONE OF LIFE’S SPICES for Quetzalians was the prerogative of clergy to declare national holidays at random. On the eleventh day of bad weather, Vaxcala concluded that everybody deserved to stay home and listen to the pleasant percussion of rain on windows. All over Quetzalia, workers who loathed their jobs and bosses who loathed their workers lit candles to the high priestess, while parents, stuck with their children, wished her warts.
The Hospital of Chimec continued to cure, of course, but inessentials were canceled, including the afternoon staff meeting. Reaching Olo before lunchtime, Tez found Francis bruising his fingers over a final longhand copy of a new encyclopedia article, “Locust Polymorphism,” and she readily persuaded him to join her on the portico for soup and chess.
One hour later an irksome knight was forking Francis’s black bishop and its neighboring rook. He stared toward the gardens, as if hope lay more in rain than in relocating the rook. The courtyard held something unexpected.
Out of the rain a mounted man loomed. He was a blur of wetness, a trotting puddle, but Francis recognized him instantly. This time, Iztac willing, his friend was flesh and blood, not a vengeful projection.
“Burne!”
“Lostwax!” Burne reined up and slid from his lipoca as Francis vaulted the portico’s railing. The Nearthlings dashed toward each other, met among flowers, shook hands, exchanged the sort of how-are-you-it’s-good-you’re-back-I-was-worried banalities where the meaning was in warmth of voice. Burne rattled around inside his saddlebag, drew out the vitreousteel cage. “This one’s been anxious to see you, too.”
Francis exuded gratitude, shielded Ollie Cortexclavus under his robe. Flushed with the happiness of this unexpected double reunion, he hustled his two friends out of the rain.
“Tez, this is Burne.”
She glided across the portico, shook Burne’s dripping hand. “The savior of Quetzalia,” she said with imperceptible sarcasm.
Through the sop of his beard Burne smiled agreeably. “Dr. Mool told me that Francis was living in sin, but after seeing you I’d call it style.”
Noticing the chessboard, he indicated to Francis whe
re the imperiled rook belonged. “I went to the hospital first, got the magnificent news that you were well again.”
Francis parted his curls and pointed. “It left a scar.” He elaborated: his wellness did not stop with his successful ablation: like the neurovorean spearpoint, his diabetes was also gone. Never again would bees covet his urine.
Before they went inside, Francis put the rook where Burne had suggested.
BURNE CAME TO DINNER dry-robed and cheerful. On Francis’s suggestion they abandoned the customary table and lazed by the fire roasting meat chunks and newly harvested corn. A wine bottle appeared. Outside, the rain was going slack.
Burne mentioned that Vaxcala had offered him a luxurious apartment in the city, whereupon Francis talked him into staying at Olo. “I think we could profit from each other’s company until we’ve”—he was tempted to say “until we’ve left this nutty planet,” but Tez was there—“er, decided about things. You know: recovering Darwin. You’ve given that some thought?”
The archeologist replied with a “maybe” that everybody knew had more to it. “Don’t you want to hear how I slew the dragon?”
He proceeded to charm them with exploits, largely fabricated, spanning the eighty days from his hasty departure to his waterlogged return. At one point he had met a woolly mammoth in Big Ghost Bayou and won its tusks in a poker game. The actual dragon-slaying also acquired a supplemental sheen, for this time the beetle merely wounded the neurovore, forcing Burne into mortal hand-to-hand combat at the edge of quicksand, and only by a final, desperate sidestep was the him-or-me situation decided in favor of me.
He omitted Ticoma’s rape entirely.
Burne’s lies enjoyed the built-in absolution of his audience’s knowledge that they were being fooled. Tez in particular seemed to have a good time, laughing in a way that reminded Francis how dear she was to him. Fear briefly knotted her when the Brain Eater came on stage, and upon its violent death she blanched with pity and shock. By the climax of the last yarn, in which Burne found a crashed space capsule containing the Holy Grail, the rain had stopped completely.
