Infinite Dreams (21 page)

Resolved not to smoke any more Earth hashish until I get my strength back.

20 April.

Algorithmic analysis has an economy and order that appeals to me. I had of course planned to take my doctorate in Letters, but now I want to investigate mathematics further. My father would have apoplexy. A gentleman
hires
mathematicians. I made an appointment with the advising facility for tomorrow.

I am having difficulty making friends. Their customs are rather strange, but I have grown up in knowledge of that and am prepared to make any adjustment. Perhaps I am too critical of Earth society.

An embarrassing illustration: this morning for the first time, I felt strong enough for sex. Thinking this would be an ideal way to begin more cordial relations with Earthies, I made a tactful suggestion of that nature to one of my classmates in Systems. She was very indignant and wound up giving me a lecture on cultural relativism. The kernel of it, at least as applied to this situation, was that one is supposed to go through an elaborate series of courting gestures with a prospective mate. Like a bird ruffing out his feathers and cooing. I told her this might make some sense if the ritual had something to do with predicting or promoting future sexual compatibility between the two people, which it didn’t. She reacted with almost frightening force.

My father had warned me about this moral oddity, but I was given to understand that it only applied to the lower classes and, specifically, to the remaining
homo sapiens
. Certainly there is a good argument for reducing the number of unengineered births by repressing casual sexual contact, but the same restrictive behavioral patterns shouldn’t be impressed on
homo mutandis
, to which group I assumed my classmate belonged. From the speciousness of her argument, I suppose it’s possible she doesn’t, but then how could she get into a university? Of course, I wouldn’t insult her by asking.

21 April.

The machine analyzed my profile and said that I had the potential for moderate success in mathematics, but that I was temperamentally better suited for literature. It advised that I continue a double course of study for as long as possible, and then switch all of my energies to one field or the other as soon as it became clear in which direction my greatest interest lay. An agreeable course of action, perhaps because of my natural indecisiveness.

I may have found a friend after all. He isn’t an Earthie, but a Martian, also come to Earth for “polish.” His name is Chatham Howard, and he was flattered that I recognized the Howard name both for its role in early Martian history and for the social rank it now represents, on Mars. He is a year ahead of me, studying sociology.

22
April

Chatham took me to a party and introduced me to a number of very pleasant Earthies. I’m still sorting out the impressions, changing my ideas a little bit. Not all Earthies my age are immature provincials.

Met an interesting female by the name of Pamela Anderson. I have begun the courting ritual, to the best of my abilities. I was attentive and complimentary (though she has some strange ideas, she is not unintelligent), and agreed to meet her tomorrow for the evening meal.

We kissed once. Odd custom.

23 April.

Chatham and a friend joined Pamela and me for dinner at Luigi’s, a restaurant which specializes in an old-fashioned
cuisine called “North-American-Italian.” It is more spicy than I am accustomed to, but Pamela recommended a fairly bland dish called
spaghetti
with mushroom sauce. It was rather good, and reminiscent of some familiar fungi dishes.

After dinner, we went to a public theatre and saw a drama-tape that consisted mainly of views of various couples, copulating. It was much the same as the tapes I’d been watching in Mental Hygiene classes since I was eight years old, but in this bizarre setting I found it strangely exciting.

We had drinks at the theatre after the show, and engaged in some bright banter. It was all very enjoyable, but I got the impression that Pamela was not yet interested in me sexually. This was a disappointment, especially after Chatham’s friend quite directly asked him to spend the night with her. Pamela was very warm but didn’t extend any such invitation.

For the first time I wondered whether she might not consider me too “alien” for a sex partner. I am a half-meter taller than she, and my Lunar myaesthenia is all too evident, with the braces and my quickness to fatigue. I’m also a couple of years younger than she, which evidently is rather important on Earth.

I found out in our conversation that many of the customs relating to this mating ritual are centuries old. This is an exasperating thing about Earth: in many ways they cling stubbornly to the cultural matrix that brought them to within a button-push of destroying humanity. On the Worlds, at least we had the sense to junk it all and start over.

Sometimes it brings me up short to remember that I was born an Earthie.

24
April

Today I got lost in the middle of writing a long Turing Machine algorithm, when my mind strayed to Pamela. I had to go back to the beginning and start over. Idiotic! Perhaps all this medication is affecting my mental discipline.

Continuing with analysis of the writings of Virgil, of at least those attributed to him. Obvious many of them written by somebody else.

25
April

Pamela met me, without prior arrangement, outside my Systems classroom—an encouragingly aggressive sign. But it turned out that her real interest was in learning more about Lunar mores, for a paper in Comp. Soc. We went down to the cafeteria and discussed, essentially, how different she was from me. I left feeling depressed, but with a “date” for a concert tomorrow.

26 April.

The concert was on an ancient instrument called the “glass harmonica.” The melodies were interesting, but the rhythm was simplistic and the harmonies progressed in a very predictable manner. Somehow, the overall effect was moving.

I learned the most startling thing after the concert. Pamela is not
mutandis
. We went to a bhang shop with another couple and talked about the difference, the distance, between
sapiens
and
mutandis
. She accused me of being ill-informed and patronizing when I talked about our obligation to guide and protect
sapiens
as they inevitably
died out over the next few generations. She said that she was not engineered and her children were not going to be, nor their children. Something else she said, we had not been taught on Luna. But, once it was pointed out, I had to admit it was obvious: there was no guarantee that genetic engineering was going to be successful in the long race, and humanity must maintain a large and pure community of
sapiens
for several centuries, in case the “experiment” fails.

I privately disagreed with her contention that
sapiens
must always remain in the majority. Certainly a million or two would be adequate to the task of rebuilding the race, should all of us
mutandi
turn purple and explode. Of course her worry was political rather than biological; that we might irrationally legislate
sapiens
out of existence, were we in the majority.

She said we had done exactly that on Luna, and I had to patiently explain why we no longer allowed
sapiens
as colonists. It was not prejudice, but simple logic. She was not convinced.

[Of course, this explains why I was so surprised to find that Pamela was not
mutandis
. All of the
sapiens
on Luna are quite old and mentally incompetent because of a lack of correctional therapeutics in their youth. I was guilty of unconsciously projecting my attitudes toward their manifest inferiority onto Earthie
sapiens.]

Somehow the fact that she is not
mutandis
does not make her less attractive to me. My regard for her intellectual abilities should be greater, knowing as I do now that she started out with a genetic handicap. The main thing I feel now is a vague distrust of her emotional reliability. Or do I mean predictability? It is all very confusing.

27 April.

Algorithmic Analysis test tonight. Not difficult but studying for it was very time-consuming.

28
April

Pamela took me to the zoo. Tiring but extremely rewarding day. Animals are fascinating. It occurred to me that being adult, or nearly so, and seeing non-human creatures for the first time in my life might give me some unique insight. Instead of writing a long entry in this diary tonight, I will begin an essay on the experience.

My feet are throbbing. Told Pamela the joke about the computer playing chess with itself, and she laughed. Was this the first time I’ve seen her laugh?

29 April.

Pamela read my essay and left saying she never wanted to see me again. She was crying.

30 April.

I have reconsidered some of the comparisons I made in the essay, between
sapiens
and animals. They were meant to be satirical, but I can see in the light of Pamela’s reaction that this intent was not clear. Rather than attempt to translate my attempts at humor into Earthie terms, I deleted these passages. I sent a copy to Pamela.

Reading back, I see I have known her little more than a week. Odd.

1 May.

Latin test.

2
May.

Pamela visited today, bringing a male companion. She did not mention the essay.

I realized that I don’t know Pamela well enough to decide whether she brought the other man, Hill Beaumont, in order to provoke jealousy in me (consciously or otherwise). I understand jealousy, of course, from my reading, but I have never felt it and believe myself immune. Besides, Beaumont is a rather stupid fellow.

3
May.

Beaumont dropped in alone today, saying that he had read the essay and complimenting me at some length on it. He is still a dull oaf, but I can’t help now feeling more kindly disposed toward him. He wanted to take me out and chatter over a bottle of wine, but I pleaded lack of time. Which was true; Greek test tomorrow evening and I have neglected it lately. Much reading to do.

I asked about Pamela and Beaumont said he hadn’t seen her since they left me yesterday.

4
May.

Greek. Stayed in my room all day, studying, but accepted an invitation to eat with Chatham and Beaumont after the test. Quite a lot happened, and even though it’s after two I think I’ll stay up and record it while it’s still fresh in my memory.

We met at Luigi’s for a light supper and wine. Chatham, of course, is always interesting, but the evening was almost spoiled for me when Beaumont revealed with a conversational flourish that he, also, was
mutandis
. In fact, he is an elected officer in a local club, the membership of which is restricted to “us.” There was a meeting of the club that night, and Beaumont invited me to come and speak to them, mainly on the subject of the essay about animals. He had his copy of the essay with him. Chatham said he had a previous engagement but urged me to go along, saying the meetings were always amusing. I didn’t see any way I could gracefully decline; figured it might even be fun as long as they weren’t all like Beaumont. We left Chatham to finish off the wine—an office for which he has singular talent—and slid a couple of blocks to the meeting place.

Some of Beaumont’s friends have the oddest ideas about what it means to be
mutandis
. The gathering was one of the strangest things I’ve experienced on Earth.

First a man got up and demonstrated a construct which was a poem, in Latin, written in the form of an eight-by-eight matrix. He showed how you could perform semantic analogues of the normal reduction transformations to get various intermediate poems—none of which made much sense—and arrive finally at a matrix which was null throughout except for sum-sum-sum-sum all down the main diagonal. A puerile exercise, bad poetry and naive mathematics, but everybody seemed dutifully impressed.

Then a woman showed a “sculpture” she had made by synthesizing a large cube of piezoelectric crystal and fracturing it, in what she felt to be an artistic way, by applying various charges to different parts of the surface. That she could have arrived at a similar end by merely dropping the thing on a hard floor did not diminish audience appreciation.

So it went for an hour and a half. My presentation was the last one, and I’m sure nine-tenths of the applause I got was due to that fact, rather than for any intrinsic merit of the composition.

The disturbing part of the evening, though, was a roundtable discussion about
sapiens
and what eventually would have to be done about them. Some of the reasoning was so fuzzy that it wouldn’t have done justice to a child in first-form Creche.

One thing I learned, one very surprising thing, was that
mutandi
make up only about 1% of the Earth’s population. Why did they hide this fact from us in Creche? At any rate, the irrational nature of some of their proposals tonight might possibly be excused as simple “minority paranoia.”

One idea which met with a good deal of approval struck me as both sneaky and foolish. There is agitation from various groups concerned with population control to make the practice of host-mothership universal, and require that all people be sterilized soon after puberty, once having filed a sample of sperm or ovum with the government. Thus the size of every family could be absolutely regulated by the government.

It was pointed out that this would inevitably lead to universal manipulation of all of humanity’s genetic material—reasoning that
mutandis
being manifestly superior to the rest of humanity, it is only a question of time before they hold all important governmental positions. Thus assured of freedom from bureaucratic interference, they would of course institute a program of universal genetic manipulation. For the benefit of all humanity.

Somebody brought up Pamela’s argument, that it will take many generations before we are sure that genetic manipulation is totally safe. Most felt that it would be sufficiently proven by the time “we” have taken over.