Gibbon's Decline and Fall (63 page)

Fragrant steam rose into Carolyn's nose, a pleasant scent in an unfamiliar context. She had smelled it before, but not as tea.

She gestured toward the bus. “The old man? He's not … not one of you.”

Tess replied, “Padre Josephus is one of our connections with the outside world. He sees things through eyes unlike ours, tells us things he sees that we do not. We provide for him, he provides for us.”

“Are you my grandma's sisters?” called Lolly from the bus door. “Are you?”

“Who was your grandmother?” called Tess.

“Her name was Immaculata Corazon.”

“We are some of her sisters.”

Lolly approached, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, stared at them as at a carnival show or a zoo exhibit. “What're you all covered up for?”

“When showing reverence or meeting strangers, we consider it appropriate. We are not blood sisters to your grandma. We are her foster sisters.” She patted the low railing beside which she sat, drawing Lolly down to perch upon it.

“You adopted her grandmother?” grated Agnes in an accusative tone. “You took the child?”

“Only in a sense. When Josephus was only a young man, he found Immaculata lost or abandoned not far from here, a mere child, barely able to tell us her name. We raised her for a few years, and when she was old enough to need company of her own people, he took her out.”

“How long have you been here?” Carolyn asked.

“Oh, some thousands of years.”

“You, personally,” cried Ophy. “You?”

Tess laughed, the laughter echoed by the others, a soft sound, like the windblown scuff of dried leaves across a stone. “No, la. I would feel bored, living so long! I speak of our people. Our ancestors. In earlier—much earlier—times, they were as your people are now, widespread across the world.
When your people began to press upon us, long, long ago, we moved into remote enclaves. To us, numbers are not strength; wisdom is strength. What profiteth a race to be numerous and stupid, la?
Behold how great we are, saith the lemming!
” She laughed.

“Where did you live before?” Lolly asked.

“We lived for a time where is now Tibet, dressing ourselves in furs and walking the heights. We lived for a time where is now Ireland, where we lived in barrows among the hills and along the shore. Not long ago we lived where is now Mesa Verde and Hoven weep. All high places or far places. Your people came closer. They saw us, made stories about us, crowded us, named us: we are the Yeti, the Sidhe, the Kachinas.…”

“Devils,” said Agnes.

“Aggie!” cried Ophy. “Please …”

“It is all right,” said Tess. “Strangers have always been called devils. We understand the tendency. Agnes is overwrought. When she sees we mean no harm, perhaps she will think differently.”

“You were saying?” said Carolyn stiffly, with a glare at Aggie.

“When your people pressed in upon our old places, we learned how to make the wall; then we came here and built it, for no place is really empty of your people anymore.” She brought the cup up under her veil, to her lips, then brought it out again. “We regret each move. We become attached to our homes. This has been our home.”

Carolyn fixed her eyes on Aggie and asked, “You're not … from somewhere else, then? You're not … supernatural? Extraterrestrial?”

“Supernatural? No. Is there any reason to think so?”

Carolyn kept her eyes on Aggie, who flushed. “The bus. The wall. The fact you're not on the map.”

“As for the bus and the wall, they are only technical tricks. Once they are understood, they are no more wonderful than electricity or television. If you showed electricity to a tenth-century man, he would think you a devil. The bus is not actually a bus, of course, but as a bus it may travel almost anywhere, unremarked, and it is often useful to travel unremarked. The walls are there to keep us away from you, to keep us quiet and unseen. We are of this earth, not from some other place. We are, so to speak, native Americans. Some
might say more native than the Indians, for we have been here longer than they. Before the last ice age made a bridge to Alaska, we had come to these continents. This is our home as it has become yours.”

Aggie flushed. Her mouth worked. “You are … Sophy's people?”

“Yes.”

“How many of you are there?” asked Ophy.

“Not many.” Tess turned and spoke to her kinswomen in a quick, sibilant tongue, then turned back to the others. “This small village, and two others, other places.”

“So few!”

“So few. We cannot be fewer and sustain our people. We cannot be many more and avoid discovery by your people, whom we have had great difficulty both avoiding and understanding. Sophy told us you do not understand yourselves?”

Carolyn laughed without humor. “I guess that's true.”

“La. How difficult for you. How difficult for us! With us the inner nature accords with the outer expectation. The body follows the mind, and the mind seeks the soul, which it strives toward but has not yet won. With you it is otherwise. The mind follows the body in pursuit of the soul you have been told you already have. Because you cannot find it, you assume you have lost it somewhere in your past, and this keeps you from achieving it in your future.”

“But we do have souls.…” cried Agnes.

“I know you are taught so,” said Tess. She sipped again before continuing. “We are so few and you are so many, you have driven us into such tiny corners that whether you understood yourselves or not, we had to understand you. Our study of you has been grave and troublesome.”

“Troublesome?” asked Jessamine.

“Yes. Since you were in the trees, your people have contended, one with the other, making battles and then making peace, and then battles, and then peace again. You have been proliferate and violent and have demanded dominion over all things. You have fought language against language, culture against culture, convulsion after convulsion. Still, even very early in your history, we saw some of you following the path intelligence must follow as it evolves, the path all thinking races follow: You were gradually learning ways that would lead to wisdom. Ways of respect for nature, ways of peace, ways of quiet cooperation.

“It was then that something happened we did not understand.” She fell silent, sipped once more.

“What was it?” asked Faye.

“A persecution began. Here and there around the world, certain of your societies began the persecution of females. There had always been some violence between your sexes, there had always been misunderstanding and pain, as well as great joy, but this was a new thing, a considered thing: an orderly, prescribed persecution of females.”

“But that's always happened,” laughed Faye. “That's the way it's always been.”

Tess shook her veiled head. “You think so, now, for you have no memories of its being otherwise, but some thousands of years ago there were female things and male things, female gods and male gods, respect toward each by each. Then rulers died for the good of their people rather than as now, when people die for the pleasure of their rulers. Though individual men and women may have had stress between them—as what people do not?—at one time there was no organized persecution.

“But such persecution began. First was disrespect of female persons, the violation of the female temples, and the denying of female gods. Then was the disrespect also of other men's gods and the teaching that only one god was true, and he male. Then was the teaching about the devil, also male, and to his jurisdiction were assigned all enemies, all strangers, just as Aggie has assigned us that role. One's own people were of God; other persons were of the devil; both were male. Then we saw the making of rules by old, powerful men to assure they would have many females to serve them or to bear their sons; from these occasions the habit ramified, and it was said to be the will of the male god. Women were enslaved, shut up in harems or cloisters, prostituted, raped, and this was said to be the will of the male god. Women's names were taken from them and they were named for their male owners. Women were considered possessions to be thrown away, burned, killed, battered, mutilated, and this, too, was said to be the will of the male god, and those who objected were said to belong to the devil. In every nation man might cry, ‘Behold, we are godly and our women are kept pure, but those others are the great Satan and their women are whores.' ”

She stood up and moved about restlessly, moved to action by her own words.

“This was not the pattern we had observed in the beginning. We found it troublesome and terrible. We began to listen to the voices of men, we paid attention to what they said and did, both subtle and overt. We watched the religions they invented, the scriptures they wrote down and claimed their male god had dictated. We listened to the disrespectful words they used for women, in all the various languages. When women longed for communion with the center of their own nature, when they reached for connection with the female principle, men sneered and spoke of the Goddess with contempt and told women to worship the Father God or die. When women turned toward their own ancient wisdom, men accused them of being witches, servants of the devil, and sent them to be burned.

“It seemed a strange and unprofitable thing to happen by chance, not in accordance with nature. After a time we realized it had not happened by chance. We realized it had been planned.”

Aggie's eyes were very wide, and she stared at the robed figure in horror.

“You're saying sexism is being controlled by someone?” Faye raised her eyebrows. “Promulgated?”

“Does it surprise you? When racism is promulgated, someone is usually responsible. A death camp, an ethnic cleansing, a marching of skinheads does not happen by itself; there is always a leader, maybe several layers of them. When religious hatred takes place, someone causes it. An inquisition, a crusade, a reformation does not simply occur out of nothing; someone always kicks the first pebble down the cliff, or breaks the first rift in the dike. The persecution of women was also caused, planned, intended. How could we have thought otherwise? How can you?”

“I guess because we can't imagine how it could be done, or why,” said Jessamine after a silence. “At least I can't.”

“As to how, it was very simple. The planner, the persecutor, simply turned evolution around and defined human females in ape terms. As, for example, in matters relating to reproduction: Women would prefer to be healthy and have healthy children, so the wise woman would choose when to bear and when not to bear. The enemy of woman, however, does not care whether women and children are well and healthy. Your enemy makes men look at females as male apes
look at them, as a source of fuck. He focuses all eyes on what is natural to the proliferate ape.”

Jessamine murmured, “You're saying … chimps do not control their numbers? So …”

“So you were told not to control your reproduction because control is unnatural—which, of course, it is. Wise, but unnatural. All wisdom is unnatural. Microscopes are unnatural. Dialysis machines are unnatural. The internal-combustion engine is unnatural. Heart-lung machines are unnatural. Aspirin and antibiotics are unnatural. Thought is unnatural, or at least highly unusual, and many of your religions limit it as much as possible! Do not think, they say. Simply believe. But gracious me, in your world fucking is natural, everything does that, so your enemy defines it not as an animal trait to be dealt with but as a natural law that can't be interfered with.”

“So if chimps have the natural capacity for violence …” Ophy offered.

“If chimps have that capacity, then the tendency of an ape to pick up a stick must be built into custom and religion, not as an animal trait to be overcome but as a divine right! Listen to your countrymen proclaim the right to bear arms. Look at the work of paranoid militias and fanatical terrorists. Listen to your national rifle group, listen to rapists and wife beaters and men in the sex trade. The mind behind the persecution of women simply takes man's chimp nature and reflects it back to him, putting the imprimatur of natural law on bestial behavior.”

“That still doesn't tell us why.”

“Why, for power! If you wish to lead men, you tell them that your power or religion or whatever will allow men to do just what they want to do. You want to rape women? Our God allows that. You want to kill homosexuals? Our God approves that. You want to force women to bear your children? Our God insists upon it, and upon your shooting anyone who would help her do otherwise! You want to have eight children? Or a dozen? Fine! Our God says that's just wonderful. And when the children die of hunger or neglect, when the very earth fails under the weight of humanity, why, that is God's will.

“Also, to control men, one must unify them around some goal or symbol, something to stir them into hot blood and battle. To control men, one must give them a cause and an enemy! Yes?”

“It always helps,” said Carolyn.

“Of course. So if one wants to control men, one canonizes the ape nature of men. One makes one's cause the protection of apishness, or, as men would say, liberty! Let every ape be as apelike as he wants! Civil liberties means liberty for each ape to do as he pleases, and civility be hanged. As for the enemy, one provides men with the best enemy possible, an enemy so different it cannot be absorbed, so necessary it cannot be totally destroyed, and enough weaker than the alpha ape that she is easy to steal from, to disrespect, and to abuse.”

“Woman?” breathed Jessamine.

“Woman. Yes. And since the abuse of woman as enemy (which is quite natural) can itself result in mindless procreation (which is also quite natural), it all fits together nicely. You are a man, you feel violence, which feeds your lust and anger—why, then, commit rape. You may do it violently or you may threaten or seduce. You may do it yourself, with your own organ, or you may do it at several removes, by making laws that allow rapists to walk freely. You wish to further violate the woman or women you have raped? Then insist she may not abort. You may do this by attacking a doctor outside a clinic or you may do it at several removes, by making it unlawful for abortions to be provided to any woman. You wish to continue violating her? Then persecute her if she does not care properly for the offspring that results from an act she did not want and a pregnancy she did not accept.”