Worlds (7 page)

(Suddenly I’m reminded of Benjamin Franklin, who spent twenty years trying to avert a revolutionary war, living in England most of that time, eloquently explaining the Colonies in England and vice versa. He was a glib and charming genius, and he failed. What am I? What will I have to do? Sometimes—now, in the dark morning—I have an almost mystical certainty that I will be some sort of a pivot, and the more I learn of history the less I want to be caught in the middle of it.)

I drank a little too much and so walked back to the dormitory—about three kilometers—with two other women, one from New New (Sheryl Markham Devon) and one from Von Braun (Claire Oswald). The walk cleared my head and woke me up. So deliciously cool now. I think New New’s planners made a mistake by choosing a constant subtropical climate. Too late to change, though, without importing a whole new ecology for the park.

New York’s streets are spooky after midnight. Most of the cabs are garaged and there’s almost no truck traffic, or buses. The slidewalks are all turned off. Half the people we met were police, and the other half were strange. A male prostitute made us a remarkable offer. Sheryl’s reply left Claire and me helpless with laughing; the whore just stood there open-mouthed. She was only half-joking, I suspect.

All of the pedestrians were men, most of them drunk or zipped. A couple of them made me nervous, but Claire was armed and we were rarely out of sight of a police officer. (Sheryl wasn’t armed but carried a spray can of Puke-O in her bag. She says it’s a fine rape deterrent unless the wind shifts. Even then, if you have a fastidious rapist.)

Back at the dormitory I met Dolores (she was at the meeting but took the subway home) in the hall, coming back from the shower with her damp sleepmate Georges. I think it’s a mistake to take up with someone from your own dorm, let alone your own floor. Convenient, though.

13 Sept.    I had it out with my advisor this morning and managed to drop the dialects class, substituting AmHist 507: “The Role of Sub-official Politics in American History.” It should be interesting, mostly a history of the Lobbies before the People’s Revolution. Spent the afternoon
in the library, looking at last week’s lectures and catching up on the reading assignments.

Becoming a real social animal. Had lunch with Benny and he asked me to go to a movie tonight, part of a free series of antique classics they’re showing at the Student Activity Center. Unfortunately it conflicted with the management seminar. At the seminar I got to talking to Lou Feiffer and we discovered a mutual interest in handball, so we’re going to meet at the gym tomorrow for a couple of rounds (he’s smaller than I am and has a hard time finding partners). Big old Hawkings also plays handball, and said he might come watch. I can feel those blue eyes on my backside already.

Well, it should help get the kinks out, if I don’t break my neck.

14 Sept.    My hand hurts so I can hardly hold the pen. I’ll be a mass of bruises tomorrow.

I could almost cry. I’m
good
at handball—but not here! In the first place, the ball won’t go where it’s supposed to. I can compensate for the extra drop for heavier gravity, but the damned thing doesn’t drift. No rotating frame of reference, no Coriolis drift. You can’t unlearn a lifetime of instinct overnight. I misjudged every damned ball, finally had to quit.

In the second place, they play handball as a competitive sport. The idea is to make the other person miss it, not to see how long you can volley. Really bizarre.

Lou was sympathetic to my frustration, after I explained about compensating for drift, and he tried serving slow ones to me. That was even worse, of course, and that’s how I got the bruises.

I was glad they have separate dressing rooms for men and women. I didn’t feel like making small talk.

Jeff Hawkings was waiting with Lou when I came out; they asked if I wanted to go find a beer. Told them I had to study. I suppose they’re both nice people, but I didn’t feel like going through the strain of being polite. Feel like a broken bone.

15 Sept.    Mother wrote saying she was pregnant again. What will it be like, having a little sister or brother (she didn’t say which) who’s twenty-one years younger? Glad I’m not living at home anymore.

I wonder if she’s just doing it for the allowance? Seems more trouble than it’s worth.

Joanna Keyes, who lives down on the 36th floor, came up and visited for a few hours this afternoon. She’s an undergraduate in politics and government, and an odd person but likeable. So intense. Very bright; she took the business course I’m in, last quarter (it’s not normally open to undergrads).

She wanted to know everything about how New New is run—not just the formal business of overlapping cells and so forth, but also what goes on behind the scenes. Who runs whom, what should be voted on and isn’t, where does the real power lie. I asked her similar questions about America and got some ferocious answers.

I’ve always thought the pre-Revolutionary system was more elegant, but it did concentrate too much power in the hands of one person. Keyes says that at least you knew who the man was then. The person who represents a Lobby in Congress is never the one who makes the real decisions; the real leaders are rarely identifiable and are never held responsible for their actions. If a puppet gets in trouble they sacrifice him and haul out another.

I don’t doubt that that’s true, at least some of the time, but it’s certainly not the whole story. If a Lobby consistently acts against the public interest, its voting power dwindles away. Keyes says that’s a cynical illusion: all the polls reflect is how much money a Lobby has put into advertising.

Well, that reinforces a cliché about groundhogs, that they sit around all day zipped, staring at the cube. But then who are all those people on the street? How do they manage to maintain a complex, technology-intensive society?
Somebody
must have some sense!

I think she’s a bit myopic. No government works perfectly; any system attracts its share of crooks. In America and New New, at least they have realtime polling. Look at England, look at the Supreme Socialist Union. By the time the will of the people has percolated to the top, the situation may have changed radically.

But I like her. She has real fire, and asks hard questions. So many of my classmates are just hard-working drudges, in the business of getting their degrees.

She wanted to take me down to a little wine-house on Eastriver, but I have to do the class on Crane Monday
(talk about drudges) and had better read some criticism or Schaumann will nail me up to dry. I told her we’d do it some time next week; she said there are always a lot of interesting people there, political types.

It occurs to me that I’m too consciously “observing” people, like an entomologist (Keyes, Joanna; 150 cm. X 40 kg., swarthy, short black hair, burning black eyes, aquiline nose,
boyish
figure, styleless clothes, radical, cynic, witty, intelligent—and possibly interested in me for reasons other than politics. Which side should I wear the earring on?). Do the people notice?

16 Sept.    Spent all day in the library, after the entertainment lab, which was more folk music. The banjo is a queer instrument; I’d only heard it Dixieland-style, strummed. The man who played for us picked the strings individually, and very fast, though repetitive. He seemed to be day-dreaming, not paying much attention to his fingers. The other soloist played the fiddle, and he was exactly the opposite. He stared down at the instrument with a fixed expression of amazement—am
I
doing that? He was a big fat man, with a white beard, and his fingers were so huge you would think he couldn’t play anything smaller than a bass. He made sweet music with it, though.

Most of the management seminar was in the library’s journal room, since our assignment was to analyze a couple of dozen papers on personnel selection, and they didn’t come in until Saturday noon. The ones who could afford copyright just made copies and took them home. Hawkings and I were there all afternoon, scribbling away. So he has a saving grace: at least he’s not rich.

17 Sept.    Waded through Crane and Crane criticism all day. He’s a good writer but I have to keep looking up archaic expressions, especially the dialect: “Dere was a mug come in d’ place d’ odder day wid an idear he was goin’ t’ own d’ place. Hully gee!” (It took me a long stare to figure out that last one was a euphemism for “Holy God!”)

18 Sept.    I was a little nervous, but the Crane class went pretty well. Schaumann assigns each author to a student, in rotation (so I won’t have to do it again for a month). The student gives a half-hour talk about the work and the author; then Schaumann takes over. You aren’t graded on
the talk. Schaumann says he teaches that way because he’s lazy, but the real reason is to give himself insurance, providing both a dialectic base for his questions and one sure victim.

After religion I went down to Eastriver to meet Keyes. Eastriver is a small city in itself, built over the East River about twenty years ago by a group of real estate developers. The developers went bankrupt and the courts still haven’t sorted out the mess. So the place has a temporary, unfinished quality to it. No big buildings; whole blocks of empty space. Some places the foamsteel construction of the bridge itself is only covered by safety gratings. You can watch the river traffic toiling by under your feet.

I met Keyes at a place called the Grapeseed Revenge. It sits in one corner of a building that evidently will someday be a warehouse, taking up maybe one-twentieth of the shell’s volume. The acoustics are incredible.

No revolutionary cabal would dare meet in a place like this; it looks too much the part. The only light comes from a candle on each table. The chairs and tables are random mismatched castoffs. Huddled groups talk in low tones. I expected to see pictures of Kowalski and Lenin on the walls.

Keyes found me while I was still groping blindly through the darkness, before my eyes adjusted to the candlelight. She led me to a table (an old door on legs, actually) and introduced me to three friends.

One of them did look like a revolutionary. His name was Will, no last name or line name offered. His face looked small, framed by an unruly cloud of hair and beard; he was slight, bony, quick-moving. He was wearing laborer’s overalls (but when I asked what he did he said “sit and think”). The other two were students, Lillian Sterne and Mohammed Twelve. They treated one another with casual affection, like long-time lovers. Lillian is small, blond, and pale as a Yorker; Mohammed is big and black. He was surprised, and pleased, that I knew how important the name Twelve was in African history. His great-grandfather’s brother. That was a bloody time.

I went through the same sort of quizzing that Keyes had done, mostly from Will. He was didactic and hostile, but intelligent. When he talked, all the others listened carefully. He was obviously used to leading.

I’m afraid I was guilty of coloring my responses—not
really lying, but feeding him what he wanted to hear, pushing him. For instance:

Will: Suppose one or both of the Coordinators were dishonest—

Me: They’re politicians.

Will: Right. What stops them from making vast personal fortunes from import and export?

Me: Ten billion dollars a week goes through their hands.

Will: And they have the final say as to suppliers and customers, on Earth.

Me: They oversee the Import-Export Board.

Will: I wonder how much someone would pay for, say, the franchise on oxygen.

Me: Hydrogen; we make our own oxygen. They’d pay plenty, I’m sure.

And so forth. What I didn’t say was, for instance, no actual money changes hands for hydrogen; it’s a straight barter with U.S. Steel. There’s no doubt a Coordinator could skim off millions—but what could you do with it? Count it? You’d have to go to Earth or Devon’s World to spend it, and people would probably find out, since ex-Coordinators automatically join the Privy Council. They’d miss your vote.

(The idea of personal wealth certainly distorts Earth politics—what an understatement—but I don’t suppose our system would work with billions of people.)

It was interesting, though. You don’t meet many real political dissidents in the Worlds; too easy to go someplace else if you don’t like it at home (it strikes me suddenly that there is more political variety in the Worlds than the Earth has had for a century). The Grapeseed Revenge is the quietest bar I’ve found in New York, by far, and the cheapest Large glass of drinkable wine for three dollars. I’ll take Benny next time.

19 Sept.    The new politics course is interesting. The stodgy old Lobbies evolved from a bunch of real pirates—I knew that from University, but it’s fun to go into the actual details of blackmail and bribery. American history is so rich with nasty treasures!

Watched Jules Hammond at the Worlds Club meeting again. Checked my pulse; still not thrilled. Meeting shifted to Wednesday next week, for the elections.

Claire Oswald told me I should be careful about the
company I keep. She’s on Keyes’s floor, and Keyes is not the most adored person there. Dolores added that the Grapeseed might
be
watched, and I am after all an alien.

Maybe I should take Hawkings there instead of Benny. See if he says hello to anyone.

20 Sept.    Small world, as they say on this big world. Benny goes to the Grapeseed all the time. Has met Will, doesn’t like him. Was going to ask me to go there, once he was sure I’d be “comfortable.”

I kidded him about being a poet and political at the same time; he said he was an unacknowledged legislator of his times. That must be a quote I’m supposed to know.

We had dinner at the dormitory machines and went on down to the Grapeseed. It’s pretty crowded at night. Will wasn’t there, for which I was doubly glad, but Lillian and Mohammed were; we sat and talked for a couple of hours.

They’re a beautiful couple, not only because they look so arresting together. They’ve only known each other seven months but fit like gears meshing.

They talked about emigrating to Tsiolkovski. I tried to talk them out of it. It’s such a joyless, hard place. They keep expanding without ever consolidating, trying to make life comfortable. Maybe I just lack pioneer spirit.