Woman On The Edge Of Time (38 page)

“Jackrabbit already has two students,” Luciente said, leaning on the railing outside the open door while Connie looked through the drawings and prints Jackrabbit started to show her next.

“Deborah and Orion aren’t pleased I’m going on defense. They’ve been slinging about it all week,” Jackrabbit complained, knotting his hand in his curly hair.

“Rough!” Luciente said flatly. “They knew when they chose you you hadn’t fulfilled defense. They didn’t have to wait for you as teacher. Let them do service work for sixmonth.”

“Their slinging saddens me,” Jackrabbit said, idly trying to tickle Connie in the ribs as she turned over the stiff sheets. “Rhythm of my life crosscutting rhythms of theirs. They feel they’re growing and want to fly faster.”

“Can’t you work alone? You didn’t always study with a teacher.” Luciente kicked off her shoes and sat with her bare feet hanging off the porch, but she could not quite reach the water.

“Why do you have to go on defense?” Connie turned from the pages. “I can’t look anymore. I’m sorry—I just can’t take more in.”

“But I have to get defending out of the way before I start mothering. It’d be stupid to do it the other way, I grasp that.”

“Your society doesn’t think that much of art and artists and all that, do you?” Connie looked away from the radiant male nude that hung on the far wall, along with twenty other paintings, drawings, prints, whatever. A naked male body hung like that—doubly hung—embarrassed her. It did not seem like something she should stare at, yet the colors glowed, the flesh shone from within. She kept glancing at it, nervously, from the corner of her eye. It was beautiful when it should not have been—like Martin, her first husband. She could not imagine him permitting anyone to paint him that way, yet if someone with talent had, his flesh would have shone so. It was neither Jackrabbit nor Bolivar. Unless Bolivar seven years younger with a bushy beard?

Luciente turned, propped her back against a post of the railing. “Why do you say that, Connie love? The great majority of us pursue some art, and sometimes more than one.”

“But that’s like amateur stuff. I mean, real artists. Like Jackrabbit. I don’t know anything, but I can see it’s for real. Yet he still has to work in the fields and go to the army and cook and all that.”

Luciente grinned “But I myself am a real geneticist and I have to defend and dig potatoes and cook and all that. I also eat and make political choices and rely on those in arms to defend me—as does Jackrabbit. Zo?”

“I comprend,” Jackrabbit said with an airy wave. “In Connie’s time it was thought some people who were good at some things, like a couple of the arts and sciences, should do nothing else.”

“That must have made them a little stupid,” Luciente said. “A little simple—you grasp? And self-important!”

“Such people tended to feel that other work demeaned their physics or sculpture or whatever. Isn’t that so, Connie?” He ran his fingers along her arm caressingly.

She pulled her arm away, embarrassed again. “Well, if a person can do something … important, why should they chop onions and pick caterpillars off tomato plants?”

“Eating isn’t important?” Luciente scowled with amazement.

“Connie, we think art
is
production. We think making a painting is as real as growing a peach or making diving gear. No more real, no less real. It’s useful and good on a different level, but it’s production. If that’s the work I want to do, I don’t have to pass a test or find a patron. But I still have family duties, political duties, social duties, like every other lug. How not?”

“Everybody? What about Bolivar? He’s always traveling.”

“Bolivar does it all in a couple of lumps. At spring planting, person does the year’s quota and then some! Does two solid weeks of preserving in August or September.”

“But going on defense—isn’t it dangerous?”

They both laughed together, that merry belly laughter. “How not?” Luciente asked. “The enemy is few but determined. Once they ran this whole world, they had power as no one, even the Roman emperors, and riches drained from everywhere. Now they have the power to exterminate us and we to exterminate them. They have such a limited base—the moon, Antarctica, the space platforms—for a population mostly of androids, robots, cybernauts, partially automated humans, that the war is one of attrition and small actions in the disputed areas, raids almost anyplace. We live with it. It’s the tag end. We fear them, but we’ve prevailed so far and we believe we’ll
win … if history is not reversed. That is, the past is a disputed area.”

“I don’t understand! And it makes me dizzy! But if Jackrabbit goes in the army, he could get killed. Aren’t some people worth sparing?”

“Show me someone who isn’t,” Luciente said. “Who isn’t precious to self? How could we decide who to spend and who to save?”

“Risk, danger … we don’t find them evil,” Jackrabbit said slowly. “I don’t twitter to go. I fasure don’t want to give back. But I don’t want to be ignorant. The creature inside a shell is a soft slug, like a worm. Who should protect me? Bolivar? Luciente? Bee? Hawk? Who’ll stand between me and death, me and sickness, me and drowning? I must serve the talent that uses me, the energy that flows through me, but I mustn’t make others serve me. Don’t you see the difference?”

“Won’t you miss him? You must mind his going?” she asked Luciente.

“Mind? How not? I mind too we’re still at war. I mind that we can’t enjoy peace and push all energies into what people need and want. I’ll miss Jackrabbit fasure. And I think it grossly unfair that I should be missing first Bee and then Jackrabbit in one year … .” Luciente looked at Jackrabbit, her eyes liquid and somber. Then her face lightened. “But I’m excited about Jackrabbit mothering. I’m a kidbinder. I’ll mother away too … .” Luciente turned to stare at the rush of the waters. “Deborah and Orion must decide if they’re going to go on working here alone this sixmonth without you, or if we should close your workshop till you get back.”

“They have a week yet to decide.” Jackrabbit took Connie’s hand. “Why are you shy with me? What do I do that tightens you?”

“Nothing!” She glared at Luciente in appeal.

“Then why do you tug your hand away?”

“Why do you want
to …
hold
it?”

Jackrabbit smiled. “When I come back from defense I’ll be running mature. Then you won’t be shy with me. Bee is nice, but I’m just as nice.” He made an exaggerated face of flirtation, batting his eyes. “Don’t you feel sorry for me, exiled for six-month? Don’t you want to comfort me?”

“Don’t tease Connie so.” Luciente made a fist at him. “You promised not to tease Connie!”

“Don’t you like to be teased? At least a little?”

“When you’re a mother,” Connie said, laughing for the first time in days, “then you can tease me.”

“If you experienced a pain in your abdominal region, if it was diagnosed as appendicitis, you might be afraid of the operation, but you wouldn’t resist it. You wouldn’t attempt to leave the hospital, because you’d know that you were sick and needed help.” Acker had cornered her again in the day room, where she had been watching a serial about a lawyer. Behind Acker’s back, Tina made faces to Connie to give support. “Now, you can’t see your brain. But you can see the output from the EEG machine. You can’t read it, because you aren’t trained, but your doctors can. You can’t see your appendix either. But you accept the expert’s opinion in either case, or condemn yourself to getting sicker and sicker.”

“Except for not getting exercise and lousy food and those meds that knock me out, I’m fine. I walked twenty miles, didn’t I?”

“And came back with abscesses on your feet. You can see those. But you can’t see abscesses in your brain, so to speak. Connie, you’re going to thank us. Because thanks to modern medical science, you’re not condemned to spend your life in a psychiatric unit.”

“Look, I guess it’s cheaper to keep me on welfare than in here. But I’ll go home tomorrow. I’ll kill myself trying to get work. I promise! I’ll scrub floors. I don’t care anymore. I’d rather do housework for white ladies than be in here!”

“Of course. And we want you to be able to return to useful work, to return to society safely—safely for you and for others. But there’s the rub, Connie. No one can trust you. If you had typhoid fever, you wouldn’t expect us to let you march out the door untreated and go walking through the streets of Manhattan freely infecting others. Now would you?” Acker waited, beaming, his hands on his slightly spread knees. Behind him, Tina was miming a gruesome death.

“I don’t think I got TB or typhoid fever—”

“I was speaking by comparison.”

“I understand that!” How stupid he thought she was! “But I don’t believe I’m sick. Like you, I’ve done things I regret and things I don’t regret. Since I’m poor, I can’t hire lawyers to make things come out right for me when I get across the law.”

“Always bad luck. Always a hard-luck story. You haven’t learned a thing, to listen to you. But I think you know better, Connie, and you’re simply resisting. When you look at your situation clearly, instead of through the eyes of irrational fear, you’ll see we’re your only real friends … . Look at Skip. I think he’s on the road to recovery. His attitude has changed since his operation. He’s trying, Connie. And that trying is going to pay off, you wait and see. He’ll be back in society soon, a productive individual, healed of his illnesses, ready to make a life for himself.”

Tina was playing a violin and dropped her hands quickly as he turned to leave.

Connie brooded over what he had said about Skip. It was true, Skip had changed. He parroted back whatever they said to him; he told them he was grateful. When they took him out and tested him with homosexual photographs, he had no what they called negative reactions. Meaning he didn’t get a hard-on. He told her he felt dead inside. They were pleased with him; they were going to write him up for a medical journal.

Skip wanted to get out. They promised he would. She wondered. Would they really let him out of their clutches? His bandages were off now and his hair was beginning to grow back. He walked around the ward, helping the attendants. He was playing the game. It was still a game, she sensed that; there was a remnant of strong will gone cold at the core pushing him. She had tried to escape in her way, he was trying in his way, with something gutted in him. Something beautiful and quick was burned out. It hurt her to watch him. Because he was too beautiful and tempted them, they had fixed him. He moved differently: clumsily. It was as if he had finally agreed to imitate the doctors’ coarse, clumsy masculinity for a time, but it was mastery with them and humility with him. He moved like a robot not expertly welded. Yet he was no robot, whatever they thought they had done. She could feel the will burning in him, a will to burst free.

“You’re playing them along, aren’t you?” She came up beside him as he was mopping the day room.

“Why not?” he asked her. He had become friendly again, but he no longer flirted or told her wild stories. He was numb, stripped to a wire of will she could feel. They had not burned out or cut out as much as they thought, she hoped. Something of Skip survived.

Jackrabbit went on defense. For a week Luciente sank into a low energy state that made it hard for them to connect. Then she took a day’s retreat at Treefrog and seemed herself to Connie.

Lunch at Mattapoisett was yellow soup thickened with tidbits of shrimp, crab, clam, and fish. Hawk was eating with them again, after several weeks with her friend Thunderbolt’s family.

“It got dull, sitting at the table with mems I can’t talk to. Now the taboo’s off, I’m back. I think I’d warm to stay in our family. See, today I brought a guest for lunch.”

Connie had often seen visitors besides herself, mostly people from nearby villages or others on their way through, traveling on some piece of business. Sometimes a whole troupe of players or musicians stopped for a week. Old friends or former mems came visiting. Then there were the people without village called politely drifters and impolitely puffs. Once she had seen a man with a small tattoo on his palm, which Luciente told her marked a crime of violence. Unlike the other guests, drifters often sat apart. People seemed uncomfortable with them. Sometimes they seemed to know each other, and when Connie passed near them, she heard a slang she did not recognize.

Why did Hawk bring this guest to the table? Connie saw on his palm that same tattoo, that warning mark. He was a big-boned oversized man with little flesh on him, perhaps in his late thirties.

“Waclaw just got done studying with the Cree!” Hawk bubbled.

“On the Attawapiskat. That flows into James Bay from the west.” He spoke in a hesitant voice from deep in his barrel chest.

“How long did you have to wait to study there?” Hawk asked. “Did you have to wait long?”

“Six years,” Waclaw said. “I was lucky they took me at all.”

“Six years!” Hawk’s face sagged. “That’s bottoming!”

“If they let everyone come who wants to study with them, they’d be swamped,” Waclaw said reasonably. “Most people won’t wait and so they don’t have to say no.”

“Was it worth it, waiting so long?” Hawk asked, still whining with disappointment.

Waclaw nodded. “It firmed me. I almost stayed. I am going to see my old village and decide. They say I can come back if I choose, to the Attawapiskat.”

As soon as lunch was over, Connie asked Luciente, “He’s a criminal, isn’t he? I saw a tattoo.”

“Not anymore. Person atoned. Has been studying up north.”

“The Cree, he said? Like Indians. You still have real Indians?”

Luciente nodded. “Those lands are strongly protected, under their control. Only hunting, gathering, and some scientific activities go on … . The Cree have a mixed way of living. They hunt and fish, they’ve created some Far North agriculture, some handicraft, limited manufacture. They have to take care, for the land is fragile.”

“What’s to study there?”

“A discipline, a sense of wholeness. Something ancient. They are often part-time hunters or gatherers, part time shamans, part-time scientists.”