Woman On The Edge Of Time (18 page)

“Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours,” Luciente said seriously, looking with shining black gaze, merry, alert in a way that cast grace notes around her words. “We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste … nothing. You might say our—you’d say religion?—ideas make us see ourselves as partners with water, air, birds, fish, trees.”

“We learned a lot from societies that people used to call primitive. Primitive technically. But socially sophisticated.” Jackrabbit paced, frowning. “We tried to learn from cultures that dealt well with handling conflict, promoting cooperation, coming of age, growing a sense of community, getting sick, aging, going mad, dying—”

“Yeah, and you still go crazy. You still get sick. You grow old. You die. I thought in a hundred and fifty years some of these problems would be solved, anyhow!”

“But Connie, some problems you
solve
only if you stop being human, become metal, plastic, robot computer. Is dying itself a
problem!”
Luciente got up to cast a last, lingering
glance at the river. “Come. Bee prompted I show you the children’s house.”

“I can’t resist that! A house for kids?” Her legs felt heavy. Suddenly she was slipping back into her drugged real body in real time. A surge of sadness flowed through her hips and belly. Worse, finally, than never to be loved again was never to hold a child next to her body. Her child. Her flesh. She felt a slackening through her, that beginning to slip out of her connection with Luciente, back to the asylum. For an instant she breathed the stifling heat of the closed isolation room, she smelled its stale fecal smell, its smell of caged and fearful bodies. She fought like a swimmer going down. She cast a soundless appeal toward Luciente: Help me! For a long nauseated moment she blurred over and she was no place, lost, terrified.

Jackrabbit was towering over her, lifting her to her feet. His thin face furrowed with serious intent. He held her against him, supporting her in a close hug with one long bony arm while the other hand gently stroked her hair back from her forehead. “Don’t sadden. Little Pepper and Salt, don’t fade on us.” Her face was level with his unbuttoned work shirt, his tanned chest prickly with brass hairs, and his voice burred through the skin into her. “We’d be stupid not to sense you’re confined wrongly. That you hurt and sadden there and no one seems to want to help you heal. That you’re fed drugs that wound your body. Enjoy us. Don’t fade from old pain and return to present pain. Guest here awhile.”

Unmistakably, as his voice burred against her and his hand kneaded her neck, urging her to relax, she felt the rise of his erection, his hardening against her. She tried to wriggle free, and he at once released her.

“I catch sexually.” He shrugged. “Don’t upset more. Truly I meant to calm you.”

“Doesn’t he drive you crazy with jealousy? Why do you let him act this way?” she asked Luciente, who was trying to control a giggling fit.

“Jackrabbit means it—person was trying to comfort you. But person wants to couple with everybody.”

“Aw, not
everybody.
Not
all
of the time.”

“Just most of the people most of the time.” Luciente put one arm through hers and one through Jackrabbit’s. “To the children’s house.”

When was a pass not a pass? When did nineteen-year-old artists throw their arms around women twice their age from the loony bin? Little Pepper and Salt: what a thing to call her, meaning her hair with the white streak along the part growing out raggedy. That reminded her too of her Texas family, for they would give each other blunt nicknames like One Arm and Old Dimwit. Anglos thought that cruel, and she had come to accept the judgment and to expect a veneer of polite refusal to admit seeing.

“Don’t you people ever have to work?” she asked irritably. They were passing greenhouses set into the earth, the sound of falling water. “All those adults taking off to watch a twelve-year-old go for a ride. You all have a mañana attitude for real.”

“We have high production!” Luciente’s black eyes glinted indignation. “Mouth-of-Mattapoisett exports protein in flounder, herring, alewives, turtles, geese, ducks, our own blue cheese. We manufacture goose-down jackets, comforters and pillows. We’re the plant-breeding center for this whole sector in squash, cucumbers, beans, and corn. We build jizers, diving equipment, and the best nets this side of Orleans, on the Cape. On top we export beautiful poems, artwork, holies, rituals, and a new style of cooking turtle soups and stews!”

“Why isn’t anybody in a hurry? Why are the kids always underfoot? How can you waste so much time talking?”

Jackrabbit waved his arms windmill fashion. “How many hours does it take to grow food and make useful objects? Beyond that we care for our brooder, cook in our fooder, care for animals, do basic routines like cleaning, politic and meet That leaves hours to talk, to study, to play, to love, to enjoy the river.”

“At spring planting, at harvest, when storms come, when some crisis strikes, Connie, we work, we stiff it till we drop … . The old folks story about how they used to have to stiff it all the time. How long the struggle was to turn things over and change them. After, what a mess the whole ying-and-yan of it was from peak to sea.” Luciente waved off into the distance. “Now we don’t have to comp ourselves that hard in ordintime … . Grasp, after we dumped the jobs telling people what to do, counting money and moving it about, making people do what they don’t want or bashing them for doing
what they want, we have lots of people to work. Kids work, old folks work, women and men work. We put a lot of work into feeding everybody without destroying the soil, keeping up its health and fertility. With most everybody at it part time, nobody breaks their back and grubs dawn to dust like old-time farmers … . Instance, in March I might work sixteen hours. In December, four …”

“You said you made jizers, comforters. Where are the factories?”

“We just passed the pillow and comforter factory.”

“Can I see it?” When she met Eddie, she had been working in a loft where many Spanish-speaking women sewed children’s clothes.

Jackrabbit bounded ahead and the door opened. Inside the opaque peach cube, she saw no one. The machinery made the most noise she had heard in the village. “Is this all automated?” she shouted.

“Fasure,” Jackrabbit shouted back. “Who wants to stuff pillows? I tore one open once hitting Bolivar over the head. What a mess! Gets up your nose. And the padded jackets with down—they’re very warm but who would want to stuff every patch?”

“They’re stuffed first, then sewn,” she said. “So nobody works in this factory? Not even a supervisor?”

“It’s mechanical,” Luciente said. “The analyzer oversees it, with constant monitoring and feedback. In operations like the brooder, most everything is automated, but we need human presence because mistakes are too serious.”

“This runs off solar energy?”

“No, methane gas from composting wastes.”

“Okay, you can automate a whole factory,” she said as they walked back into the sunshine. “So why do I see people grubbing around broccoli plants picking off caterpillars? Why is everybody running around on foot or bicycles?”

“We have so much energy from the sun, so much from wind, so much from decomposing wastes, so much from the waves, so much from the river, so much from alcohol from wood, so much from wood gas.” Luciente checked them off on her fingers. “That’s a fixed amount. Manufacturing and mining are better done by machines. Who wants to go deep into the
earth and crawl through tunnels breathing rock dust and never seeing the sun? Who wants to sit in a factory sewing the same four or five comforter patterns?”

“There are ten, in fact,” Jackrabbit said. “I counted them.”

“Only you have been in enough beds to be sure,” Luciente said with a tucked-in smile. They walked on toward a joined group of free-form buildings of sinuous curves suggesting a mass of eggs, but with long loops thrown off and high arches and arcades. This just-grew was the color of terra cotta. A vine ran all over the south side, with big velvet flowers that gave off a fragrance of cloves. Bird feeders hung from every protrusion, out of windows, on posts. The roof was studded with bird-houses and a pigeon coop built in, as if the masonry broke into lace through which pigeons went fluttering and cooing.

Small gardens ran right among the clump of buildings, vegetables and flowers intermixed, tomato plants growing with rosebushes and onions, pansies and bean plants. Some were planted in open borders and some were surrounded by a thin shimmery fence like spiderweb. Out over the bay a towering mass of gray clouds was forming as the wind rose.

“Smells like rain,” Jackrabbit said. “The day’s turning.”

“I hope if it’s going to rain, Innocente has time to complete a shelter.” Luciente eyed the clouds. “Hope Bee and Otter get back before the storm. Lux too, I mean,” she added guiltily.

“When I was on my naming, it rained every damned day,” Jackrabbit said. “I should have come back Drowned Rat.”

In one of the spiderweb gardens an old man with a bush of white hair and a gnarled face, arms like driftwood scoured by salt and wind, was picking peas into a basket and weeding into another, with two kids of nine or ten working on either side.

“How come they aren’t in school?” she asked. “Is school out already for the summer?”

“That
is
school,” Luciente said, drawing Connie nearer to them.

“This one is lamb’s-quarters, no?” one kid was asking.

“Can you eat it?”

“Fasure.”

“Look at the shape of the pea flowers. Most legumes have irregular flowers with five petals—see, the two lower ones join in a keel, like the keel on the fishing boats. The two at the sides
are like spread wings. Then you have one on top. Most legumes have leaves like these.”

“Alternate. Compound. With these twisty things that hold on?”

“Tendrils. Some have thorns instead. After we’re done weeding, we’ll look for a tree that’s evolved in a typical legume way, that has thorns a couple of inches long.” His fingers showed the size.

As they strolled on, she said, “But they can’t possibly learn as much that way as they would in a classroom with a book!”

“They can read. We all read by four or so,” Jackrabbit said. “But who wants to grow up with a head full of facts in boxes? We never leave school and go to work. We’re always working, always studying. We think, what person thinks person knows has to be tried out all the time. Placed against what people need. We care a lot
how
things are done.”

“Every seven years you get a sabbatical,” Luciente said. “You’re off production for a year and all you’re liable for is family stuff. Some go study in their field. Some learn a language or travel. Hermit in the wilderness. Pursue some line of private research. Or paint. Or write a book.”

Connie had been craning her head around. “I see a lot of old people here. Is this building like an old folks’ home too?”

Outside on the first lawn of grass she had seen here, a circle of small children sat crowding around an old woman with her hair in braids and the face of a defiant eagle. In spite of her age she still had some teeth—they were too yellowed and irregular to be dentures—and she was telling a story in a high quavering dramatic voice. “Then Green Fire came to Box Turtle and when Box Turtle saw, Box Turtle closed per box tight with a hissing of air.” Her ancient brown claw hands became the turtle closing. “Green Fire sat down quietly, tucking per feet under, and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally Box Turtle slowly opened the shell a little peek and peered out.”

“When I was little, that was my favorite story,” Jackrabbit said. “I imagined when I was twelve I would take that name, Green Fire.”

“Box Turtle’s little leathery head stuck out of the shell and per little red eyes stared at Green Fire. ‘What do you want, long-legged one?’ asked Box Turtle.

“‘I want to learn to hide as you do,’ Green Fire said.

“‘Hiding is easy when you know how,’ said Box Turtle. ‘But first you must trade me your long legs that run so fast, before you can learn to hide the way I do.’”

“Sappho perself made that tale long ago.” Jackrabbit was watching the old woman with admiration. “Many people now tell that story, but none better. At Icebreaking I taped per telling with the latest varia for the holifile. Sappho’s tales have great strength and radiance.”

Luciente snapped her fingers. “We never answered your question.” They passed under an archway into a room full of books on shelves, screens set into alcoves, displays and cameras and sound equipment and art supplies. A dozen kids were busy in the room. An old man—or perhaps woman—with the wiry, brittle body of spry old age was showing a small child how to work television sets that spewed reams of paper at the touch of a dial. Jackrabbit ambled off to see what some kids were doing, working on a small holi projector. Luciente stayed at her side, saying, “We believe old people and children are kin. There’s more space at both ends of life. That closeness to birth and to death makes a common concern with big questions and basic patterns. We think old people, because of their distance from the problems of their own growing up, hold more patience and can be quieter to hear what children want. Not everyone who teaches the young is old—we all teach. The kids work with us. We try to share what we have learned and what we don’t know … . I think maybe growing up is less mysterious with us since the adult world isn’t separate. What better place to learn anatomy than in a clinic? What better place to learn botany than a field of corn? What better place to study mechanics than a repair shop?”

“How can Red Star repair a floater with a mob of kids underfoot?”

“A mob of kids?” Luciente shook her hair back roughly. “I puzzle, I admit … . We think about kids so different it makes us crosstalk, my friend … . We ask a lot of our kids but … politely? It’s not the one-to-one bind you had with your daughter, from what you say. We have more space, more people to love us. We grow up closest to our mothers, but we
swim close to all our mems—or some, at least!” Luciente grinned. “We have handfriends and pillowfriends among other children in the children’s house … . It’s hard for me to inknow what it would feel like to love only
one
and have only
one
soul to love me.”