Then it seemed for a while that everywhere she was she heard her own voice saying “When I am a grandmother, they say. . . .” on the speaker, and people she hardly knew at school said, “Hey I heard your poem, it was zazz.” All the angels liked it specially and told her so.
She was going to be a poet, of course. She would be really great, like 2-Eli Ali. Only instead of little short weird obscure poems like Eli’s, she would write a great narrative poem about—actually the problem was what should it be about. It could be a great historical epic about the Zero Generation. It would be called Genesis. For a week she was excited, thinking about it all the time. But to do it she’d really have to learn all the history that she was sort of gliding through in History, she’d have to read hundreds of books. And she’d have to really go into V-Dichew to feel what it had been like to live there. It would all take years before she could even start writing it.
Maybe she could write love poems. There were an awful lot of love poems in the World Lit anthology. She had a feeling that you didn’t need to really be in love with a person to write a love poem. Maybe in fact if you were really seriously in love it would interfere with the poetry. A sort of yearning, undemanding adoration like she felt for Bass Abby, or for Rosa at school, maybe was a good place to start from. So she wrote quite a few love poems, but for one reason or another she was embarrassed about turning them in to her teacher, and only showed them to Luis. Luis had acted all along like he didn’t think she was a poet. She had to show him.
“I like this one,” he said. She peered to see which one.
What is the sadness in you
that I see only in your smile?
I wish I could hold your sadness
in my arms like a sleeping child.
She hadn’t thought much of the poem, it was so short, but now it seemed better than she’d thought.
“It’s about Yao, isn’t it?” Luis said.
“About my father?” Hsing said, so shocked she felt her cheeks burning. “No! It’s a love poem!”
“Well, who do you actually love a lot besides your father?” Luis asked in his horrible matter-of-fact way.
“A whole lot of people! And love is—There are different kinds—”
“Are there?” He glanced up at her. He pondered. “I didn’t say it was a sex poem. I don’t think it is a sex poem.”
“Oh, you are so weird,” Hsing said, abruptly and deftly snatching her writer back and closing the folder labelled Original Poems by 5-Liu Hsing. “What makes you think you know anything about poetry anyhow?”
“I know about as much about it as you do,” said Luis with his pedantic fairness, “but I can’t do it at all. You can. Sometimes.”
“Nobody can write great poetry all the time!”
“Well,”—her heart always sank when he said “Well”—“maybe not literally all the time, but the good ones have an amazingly high average. Shakespeare, and Li Po, and Yeats, and 2-Eli—”
“What’s the use trying to be like them?” she wailed.
“I didn’t mean you had to be like them,” he said after a slight pause and in a different tone. He had realised that he might have hurt her. That made him unhappy. When he was unhappy he became gentle. She knew exactly how he felt, and why, and what he’d do, and she also knew the fierce, regretful tenderness for him that swelled up inside her, a sore tenderness, like a bruise. She said, “Oh, I don’t care about all that anyway. Words are too sloppy, I like math. Let’s go meet Lena at the gym.”
As they jogged through the corridors it occurred to her that in fact the poem he had liked wasn’t about Rosa, as she had thought, or about her father, as he had thought, but was about him, Luis. But it was all stupid anyhow and didn’t matter. So she wasn’t Shakespeare. But she loved quadratic equations.
4-Liu Yao
HOW SHELTERED THEY WERE, HOW protected! Safer than any guarded prince or pampered child of the rich had ever been; safer than any child had ever been on Earth.
No cold winds to shiver in or heavy heat to sweat in. No plagues or coughs or fevers or toothaches. No hunger. No wars. No weapons. No danger. No danger from anything in the world but the danger the world itself was in. But that was a constant, a condition of being, and therefore hard to think about, except sometimes in dream; the horrible images. The walls of the world deformed, bulging, shattering. The soundless explosion. A spray of bloody mist, a tiny smear of vapor in the starlight. They were all in danger all the time, surrounded by danger. That is the essence of safety, the heart of it: that the danger is outside.
They lived inside. Inside their world with its strong walls and strong laws, shaped and bulwarked to protect and surround them with strength. There they lived, and there was no threat unless they made it.
“People are a risky business,” Liu Yao said, smiling. “Plants mostly don’t go crazy.”
Yao’s profession was gardening. He worked in hydroponic engineering and maintenance and in plant-genetic quality and control. He was in the gardens every workday and many evenings. The 4-5-Liu homespace was full of pet plants—gourdvines in carboys of water, flowering shrubs in pots of dirt, epiphytes festooning the vents and light-fixtures. Many of them were experimentals, which usually died. Hsing believed that her father was sorry for these genetic errors, felt guilty about them, and brought them home to die in peace. Occasionally one of the experiments thrived under his patient attendance and went back to the plant labs in triumph, accompanied by Yao’s faint, deprecating smile.
4-Liu Yao was a short, slender, handsome man with a shock of black hair early going grey. He did not have the bearing of a handsome man. He was reserved, courteous, but shy. A good listener but a rare and low-voiced talker, when he was with more than one or two people he was almost entirely silent. With his mother 3-Liu Meiling or his friend 4-Wang Yuen or his daughter Hsing he would converse contentedly, unassertively. His passions were contained, restrained, powerful: the Chinese classics, his plants, his daughter. He thought a good deal and felt a good deal. He was mostly content to follow his thoughts and feelings alone, in silence, like a man going downstream in a small boat on a great river, sometimes steering, more often drifting. Of boats and rivers, of cliffs and currents, Yao knew only images in pictures, words in poems. Sometimes he dreamed that he was in a boat on a river, but the dreams were vague. He knew dirt, though, knew it exactly, bodily. Dirt was what he worked in. And water and air he knew, the humble, transparent things, on whose clarity, invisibility, life depended, the miracles. A bubble of air and water floated in the dry black vacuum, reflecting starlight. He lived inside it.
3-Liu Meiling lived in the group of homespaces called Peony Compound, a corridor away from her son’s homespace. She led an extremely active social life limited almost entirely to the Chinese-Ancestry population of Quadrant Two. Her profession was chemistry; she worked in the fabric labs; she had never liked the work. As soon as she decently could she went on halftime and then retired. Didn’t like any work, she said. Liked to look after babies in the baby-garden, play games, gamble for flower-cookies, talk, laugh, gossip, find out what was happening next door. She took great pleasure in her son and granddaughter and ran in and out of their homespace constantly, bringing dumplings, rice cakes, gossip. “You should move to Peony!” she said frequently, but knew they wouldn’t, because Yao was unsociable, and that was fine, except she did hope that Hsing would stay with her own people when she decided to have a baby, which she also said frequently. “Hsing’s mother is a fine woman, I like Jael,” she told her son, “but I never will understand why you couldn’t have had a baby from one of the Wong girls and then her mama would be right here in Quadrant Two, that would have been so nice for all of us. But I know you have to do things your way. And I must say even if Hsing is only half Chinese Ancestry nobody would ever know it, and what a beauty she’s getting to be, so I suppose you did know what you were doing, if anyone ever does when it comes to falling in love or having a child, which I doubt. It’s basically luck, is all
it is. Young 5-Li has an eye on her, did you notice yesterday? He’s twenty-three, a good solid boy. Here she is now! Hsing! How beautiful your hair is when it’s long! You should let it grow longer!” The kind, practical, undemanding babble of his mother’s talk was another stream on which Yao floated vaguely, peacefully, until all at once, in one moment, it was cut short. Silence. A bubble had burst. A bubble in an artery of the brain, the doctors said. For a few hours 3-Liu Meiling gazed in mute bewilderment at something no one else could see, and then died. She was only seventy. All life is in danger, from without, from within. People are a risky business.
The Floating World
THE BRIEF FUNERAL WAS HELD in Peony Compound; then the body of 3-Liu Meiling was taken by her son and granddaughter and the technician to the Life Center to be recycled, a chemical process of breakdown and re-use with which as a chemist she had been perfectly familiar. She would still be part of their world, not as a being but as an endless becoming. She would be part of the children Hsing would bear. They were all part of one another. All used and users, all eaters, all eaten.
Inside a bubble where there is so much air and no more, so much water and no more, so much food and no more, so much energy and no more—in an aquarium, perfectly self-contained in its tiny balancing act: one catfish, two sticklebacks, three water-weeds, plenty of algae, three snails, maybe four, but no dragonfly larvae—inside a bubble, the population must be strictly controlled.
When Meiling dies she is replaced. But she is no more than replaced. Everybody can have a child. Some can’t or won’t or don’t have children and some children die young, and so most of those who want two children can have two children. Four thousand isn’t a great number. It is a carefully maintained number. Four thousand isn’t a great gene pool, but it is a carefully selected and managed one. The anthrogeneticists are just as watchful and dispassionate as Yao in the plant labs. But they do not experiment. Sometimes they can catch a fault at the source, but they have not the resources to meddle with twists and recombinations. All such massive, elaborate technologies, supported by the continuous exploitation of the resources of a planet, were left behind by the Zero Generation. The anthrogeneticists have good tools and know their job, and their job is maintenance. They maintain the quality, literally, of life.
Everyone who wants to can have a child. One child, two at most. A woman has her motherchild. A man has his fatherchild.
The arrangement is unfair to men, who have to persuade a woman to bear a child for them. The arrangement is unfair to women, who are expected to spend three-quarters of a year of their life bearing somebody else’s child. To women who want a child and cannot conceive or whose sexual life is with other women, so that they have to persuade both a man and a woman to get and give them a child, the arrangement is doubly unfair. The arrangement is, in fact, unfair. Sexuality and justice have little if anything in common. Love and friendship and conscience and kindness and obstinacy find ways to make the unfair arrangement work, though not without anxiety, not without anguish, and not always.
Marriage and linking are informal options, often chosen while the children are young, for many women find it hard to part with a fatherchild, and a homespace for four is luxuriously spacious.
Many women do not want to bear or bring up a child at all, many feel their fertility to be a privilege and obligation, and some pride themselves on it. Now and then there is a woman who boasts of the number of her fatherchildren, as of a basketball score.
4-Steinfeld Jael bore Hsing; she’s Hsing’s mother, but Hsing isn’t her child. Hsing is 4-Liu Yao’s child, his fatherdaughter. Jael’s child is Joel, her motherson, six years older than his halfsister Hsing, two years younger than his halfbrother 4-Adami Seth.
Everybody has a homespace. A single is one and one half rooms; a room is a space of 960 cubic feet. The commonest shape is 10’ x 12’ x 8’, but since the partitions are movable the proportions can be altered freely within the limits of the structural space. A double, like the 4-5 Lius’, is usually arranged as two little sleepcells and a large sharespace: two privacies and a commonality. When people link, and if they each have one or two children, their homespace may get quite large. The 3-4-5-Steinman-Adamis, Jael and Joel and 3-Adami Manhattan, to whom she has been linked for years, and his fatherson Seth, have 3,840 cubic feet of homespace. They live in Quad Four, where a lot of Nor-Ans live, Northamerican and European Ancestry people. With her usual flair for the dramatic, Jael has found an area in the outer arc where there’s room for ten-foot ceilings. “Like the sky!” she cries. She has painted the ceilings bright blue. “Feel the difference?” she says. “The sense of liberation—of freedom?” In fact, when she goes to stay with Jael on visits, Hsing finds the rooms rather disagreeable; they seem deep and cold, with all that waste space overhead. But Jael fills them with her warmth, her golden, inexhaustible voice, her bright clothing, her abundance of being.
When Hsing began menstruating and learning how to use prevention and brooding about sex, both Jael and Meiling told her that having a baby is a piece of luck. They were very different women, but they used the same word. “The best luck,” Meiling said. “So interesting! Nothing else uses all of you.” And Jael talked about how your relation to the baby in your womb and the newborn baby nursing was part of sex, an extension and completion of it that you were really lucky to know. Hsing listened with the modest, cynical reserve of the virgin. She’d make up her own mind about all that when the time came.
Many Chi-Ans had, more or less silently, disapproved of Yao’s asking a woman of another quadrant and a different ancestry to bear his child. Many people of Jael’s ancestry had asked her if she wanted an exotic experience or what. The fact was Jael and Yao had fallen desperately in love. They were old enough to realise that love was all they had in common. Jael had asked Yao if she could have his child. Moved to the heart, he had agreed. Hsing was born of an undying passion. Whenever Yao came to bring Hsing for a visit, Jael flung her arms about him crying “Oh Yao, it’s you!” with such utter, ravished joy and delight that only a man as thoroughly satisfied and self-satisfied as Adami Manhattan could have escaped agonies of jealousy. Manhattan was a huge, hairy man. Perhaps being fifteen years older, eight inches taller, and a great deal hairier than Yao helped him to be unjealous of him.
Grandparents provided another way to increase the size of a homespace. Sometimes relatives, halfsibs, their parents, their children grouped together in still larger spaces. Next down the corridor from the 4-5 Lius’ was the 3-4-5-Wangs’—Lotus Compound—eleven contiguous homespaces, the partitions arranged so as to provide a central atrium, the scene of ceaseless noise and activity. Peony Compound, where Meiling had lived all her life, always had from eight to eighteen homespaces. None of the other ancestries lived in such large groupings.
In fact by the fifth generation many people had lost any sense of what ancestry was, found it irrelevant, and disapproved of people who based their identity or their community on it. In Council, disapproval was frequently expressed of Chinese-Ancestry clannishness, referred to by its critics as “Quad Two separatism” or more darkly as “racism,” and by those who practiced it as “keeping to our ways.” The Chi-Ans protested the new Schools Administration policy of shifting teachers around from quad to quad, so that children would be taught by people from other ancestries, other communities; but they were outvoted in Council.
The Bubble
DANGERS, RISKS. IN THE GLASS bubble, the fragile world, the danger of schism, of conspiracy, the danger of aberrant behavior, madness, the violence of madness. No decision of any consequence at all was to be made by a single person acting without counsel. Nobody ever, since the beginning, had been allowed alone at any of the systems controls. Always a backup, a watcher. Yet there had been incidents. None had yet wreaked permanent damage.
But what of the merely normal, usual behavior of human beings? What is aberrant? Who’s sane?
Read the histories, say the teachers. History tells us who we are
, how we have behaved, therefore how we will behave.
Does it? The history in the bookscreens, Earth History, that appalling record of injustice, cruelty, enslavement, hatred, murder—that record, justified and glorified by every government and institution, of waste and misuse of human life, animal life, plant life, the air, the water, the planet? If that is who we are, what hope for us? History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.
The foam of the salt ocean has tossed up a bubble. It floats free.
To learn who we are, look not at history but at the arts, the record of our best, our genius. The elderly, sorrowful, Dutch faces gaze out of the darkness of a lost century. The mother’s beautiful grave head is bowed above the dead son who lies across her lap. The old mad king cries over his murdered daughter, “Never, never, never, never, never!” With infinite gentleness the Compassionate One murmurs, “It does not last, it cannot satisfy, it has no being.” “Sleep, sleep,” say the cradle songs, and “Set me free” cry the yearning slave-songs. The symphonies rise, a glory out of darkness. And the poets, the crazy poets cry out, “A terrible beauty is born.” But they’re all crazy. They’re all old and mad. All their beauty is terrible. Don’t read the poets. They don’t last, they can’t satisfy, they have no being. They wrote about another world, the dirt world. That too, too solid world which the Zeroes made naught of.
Ti Chiu, Dichew, the dirt-ball. Earth. The “garbage” world. The “trash” planet.
The Found and the Lost Page 71
