by Nancy Kress
When all the kids had been strapped in—the others wouldn’t look directly at me, either—I took my place at the computer and McGratty, at the author’s console, began typing.
SUDDENLY. THAT WAS HOW THE WILD PALOMINO CAME BACK INTO CARIANNA’S LIFE, LEAPING OVER THE WHITE PICKET FENCE INTO HER AUNT’S VEGETABLE GARDEN, TOSSING HIS MAGNIFICENT WHITE MANE. HE MUST HAVE COME FROM THE DESERT, CARIANNA THOUGHT IN CONFUSION—BUT SHE DIDN’T CARE WHERE HE HAD COME FROM; SHE WAS TRANSFIXED WITH DELIGHT, JUST WATCHING HIM.
Rapid, low-voltage, irregular waves appeared on my synthesis screen: McGratty’s narrative hook had engaged their attention. I scanned the individuals. Only two showed latencies. One was so uninvolved she was practically in alpha waves, and I pressed for an IQ: 72. McGratty wasn’t aiming at that audience; how the hell had her card slipped in? I punched the keys that canceled her responses from the synthesis, though I kept her individuals.
The word-by-word looked good, except for a slight flag on “transfixed.” McGratty might consider changing it; it was possible some of them didn’t know what it meant. High response to the name “Carianna.” A few subliminal-stimulus lights even flickered, and I wondered yet again why little girls always went for such flashy names. The emotional-involvement index wasn’t pronounced, but that didn’t matter much at the beginning. The attention patterns were the important thing.
THE PALOMINO SNORTED, THEN ARCHED HIS LONG NECK FORWARD TO PULL AT AUNT MAUD’S CARROT TOPS. SUNLIGHT POURED OVER HIS GOLDEN COAT. THEN, ALL AT ONCE, CARIANNA SAW THE NOTCH ON THE HORSE’S EAR. “ROCKET,” SHE WHISPERED, STUNNED. “IT’S ROCKET!”
The attention curves were still rising, with a slight dip at the sentence about the sunlight. But that’s inevitable with description, even when you keep it short. The individuals showed the beginning of emotional involvement in four girls. I checked the running evals to see if there was a conscious critical reaction to that awkward “all at once, Carianna saw” (how else would she see except all at once?) but the evals were all flat. Preadolescent girls are not a very critical audience. I’ve never monitored an adult-level composing session, although I’ve seen tapes with myself as subject. Even interpreting those made me dizzy. How complex are your reactions when you read Macbeth?
SLOWLY, TRYING NOT TO STARTLE THE BEAUTIFUL PALOMINO, CARIANNA MOVED SIDEWAYS TOWARD THE FENCE, WHERE HER LARIAT HUNG. SHE STILL COULDN’T BELIEVE IT WAS ROCKET. SHE HAD BEEN SO SURE HE WAS LOST TO HER FOREVER, THAT TERRIBLE DAY TWO YEARS AGO WHEN HE TOOK TO THE DESERT. TWO STEPS MORE, ONE MORE, AND HER FINGERS CLOSED ON THE LARIAT.
I would bet my job that not one of these New York kids has ever seen a lariat, except on video. Nor a desert, nor a wild horse, nor a carrot still in the ground—probably not even a goddam picket fence. And as a work of art, McGratty’s story was . . . straight from the horse. But engagement derives from subjective significance, the unconscious effect of personal, social, and subliminal factors. It looked like McGratty was in.
CARIANNA RAISED THE LARIAT, AS UNCLE BOB HAD TAUGHT HER. ROCKET LOOKED UP, HIS NOSTRILS FLARING. OUTLINED BY THE BLAZING SUN, HE WAS SO BEAUTIFUL THAT CARIANNA FELT HER THROAT TIGHTEN. BUT HER HAND WAS STEADY AS SHE TWIRLED THE ROPE AND SENT IT FLYING TOWARD THE PALOMINO’S NECK. ROCKET REARED AND PLUNGED, TEARING UP THE CARROTS. CARIANNA CRIED OUT, DESPITE HERSELF. HAD SHE MISSED? OR DID SHE—COULD SHE—HAVE ROCKET AGAIN FOR HERSELF?
The synthesis of evoked potentials was so thick it looked like a Rorschach smear. Good readings on the glutanic and aspartic acids that go with prolonged attentiveness, nice curves on emotional engagement and subliminal stimuli, even the start of a negative cortical variation, and it was early for that. I glanced at the evals: flat. But, then, McGratty’s preselects had included no IQ’s over sigma one. He knew his limits. Within those limits, it looked promising, unless he stumbled badly later in the story, and even if he did, we could probably fix it. Three or four more c-auds, and the story would evoke exactly the response patterns that sold the best. Another triumph for American fiction.
No, that wasn’t fair. After all, Nellie Kay Armbruster had as much right to have her cortical attention engaged by whatever happened to engage it as did the readers of Shakespeare or Joyce. And McGratty’s opus might even make us a little money, while the preselects for something like Greta were always incredibly restricted: bright, intense “young adults” with a lit-passion of 11 or better.
I didn’t want to read Greta.
Rocket plunged over the edge of a convenient mesa, and one of the girls gasped loudly. Quickly I checked the distraction-wave index: nothing. The others were so absorbed they hadn’t heard her.
McGratty was in.
“Look at this, Mary,” Garber said. The printouts from McGratty’s c-aud spread over his desk, looping in tangled coils and trailing gracefully to the floor. A coffee mug sat on top, spreading a leisurely brown stain over an aspartic acid curve. Garber ignored all of it, squinting through his sunken blue eyes at a piece of green paper.
“Look at what?” I said, removing the coffee mug. “That’s the third one this week. I think they’re growing.” He handed me the paper. It was a leaflet printed in blurry block letters on cheap poison-green newsprint.
THE UNSUSPECTED DANGER
What is the most dangerous enemy presently in the United States? What force poses the most long-term threat to you, your children, and their children? Do YOU know?
It’s not what you may think! This is a hidden danger, a danger to the MIND. It’s the so-called “composing-audience” writing of the books you read, the books your children read, and YES! even the textbooks they use in their schools! Do you want your children guided by teachings and so-called “art” composed by machines? Haven’t we lost enough of our humanity to the computer? Aren’t enough of our decisions already removed from our own human hands to cold and inhuman machines? How brainwashed and helpless do YOU want to be before the all-powerful computer?
YOU CAN HELP! Just detach and return the attached coupon with a 500 donation to help the crusade against dehumanization and brainwashing!
□ YES! I want to cry out against control of my mind by a machine! Enlist me as a crusader! 500 donation enclosed.
□ Send me more information on computer control of school textbooks!
I laughed. “It’s nothing but a con for suckers, Garber.”
“With what fifty cents buys now? I doubt they’re even covering their printing costs.”
“A bunch of splitbrains, then.”
“Maybe.” He drummed his fingers on McGratty’s printout, a muffled noise like the falling of fat, cushiony rocks. A loop of the printout creased in erratic folds. “But there’s a lot of them out there, then. Practically every time I leave the building I get one of these shoved at me.”
“Garber, why are you even concerned? Of course there’s a lot of splitbrains out there. There’s supposed to be a lot of them; the tourists wouldn’t feel they were getting their money’s worth out of New York if it weren’t swarming with splitbrians. And you know what this garbage is as well as I do—it’s just the inevitable fussing about any move to automation. People fussed when babies were conceived in tubes. People fussed when electric looms wrecked hand weaving. People even fussed when eating with forks replaced fingers, for chrissake—did you know that?” Garber didn’t answer. One of his most endearing traits is his acceptance of other people’s melodrama. Specifically mine.
“It’s true. Forks. They yelled ‘lifeless’ and ‘inhuman’ and ‘foul’ until, after a while, they saw that it was just another tool, and the yelling died down and everybody went home. This is just the same. Another tool. So why are you upset?”
“I don’t know.” He gave me a little, indulgent half smile for my performance, but kept on drumming his fingers. I slid McGratty’s now-wrinkled printout from under them and began rolling it up.
“Mary, I talked to Jameson today.”
“He’s not going to review Greta?”
“No.”
“W
ell, I expected that.”
“He sounded . . . strange. Evasive. Something had upset him. A lot.”
I shrugged and kept on rolling. “So he’s being sued for libel. Or divorce. Or bankruptcy.”
“No, it didn’t . . . feel like anything personal. Just something big.”
I stopped rolling and looked at Garber. He may have no business judgment whatever, but he can have a shrewdness, an intuition, about people that I’ve learned to think twice about.
Even if it did fail him spectacularly in the case of Mummy-sweet.
“What sort of a something big?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t think it’s connected with that nonsense?” I nodded toward the poison-green leaflet.
Garber frowned, Santa Clause with a wayward reindeer. “No. Not directly, anyway. But something’s up, somewhere. And of all the big-league critics, Jameson’s been the one singing loudest hosannas for c-auds.”
This wasn’t strictly accurate, but I allowed Garber his hyperbole, although the picture of a wizened little Times literary critic as a hosanna-singing archangel was pretty funny. “New Century renaissance”—Jameson had been the first to come up with the term, but now they all used it, all sounded equally enthusiastic hosannas. And why not? Critics may distrust authors, but they love and delight in truly good writing. “Renaissance” is even too pale a word for the works that have come out of the last twenty years, since c-auds. To know for sure when your vision as a writer has gone beyond the peculiarities of the singular. “I.” To be able to hammer at that vision until it reaches and moves readers at the subliminal, universal level of involuntary body responses, not merely the tangled and ego-guarded one of verbalized “criticism.” To move that hammering from a lonely, locked-room struggle to a shared struggle, a cooperative act between creator and a selected, involved audience who also became creators, participatory gods. Is it any wonder that the New Century Renaissance has given us The Golden Grasses, Cranston’s Mountain, All the Winning Numbers, A Sheep of Mantua? Critics like Jameson don’t care if Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays or c-aud “wrote” The Golden Grasses. The play’s the thing. So what was wrong?
“So what’s wrong, Garber?”
“I keep telling you, I don’t know!” He frowned again, then shook his head vigorously from side to side like some mangy, whitened bear, and smiled. It’s Garber’s favorite trick for erasing trouble, for reorienting himself to some inner, serene world. The anxieties just shake out of his ears or something, and poof! they’re gone. It’s what he did when the doctors told him about the cancer; it’s what he does after each virotherapy session; it’s what he did after he told me all those years ago that he was divorcing my mother. Shake, shake. God, I envy him.
“Have dinner with me, Mary. I’ll take you to Cellini’s.”
“I can’t, Garber. Susan’ll be home.”
“I thought Tuesday she had Star Scouts.”
“She quit. ‘Too babyish.’ ”
“Then bring her along. She’ll like Cellini’s.”
I was tempted. Discreet service, good wine, the illusion of space and leisure in the midst of New York’s steel caves. Cellini’s incomparable beef Wellington. The relaxed luxury of inconsequential shop talk away from the pressing decisions of an actual shop. Garber was wonderful at that; in the pampered atmosphere of a good restaurant he seemed to expand and glow, like the rosy potbellied candles on each table, into a genial incandescence that shone benignly on all. The quality of mercy.
But Susan would object when Garber and I talked shop; I would object when she insisted on having a cocktail; Garber would object, with genuine if genial distress, that Susan and I were battling yet again. He would remind us how well we used to get along when Susan was a baby Susan would say that she was not a baby and would thank everyone to remember that. I would reply, with some heat, that Garber hadn’t said she was, and Garber would look from Susan to me and back again with pained, puzzled incomprehension and ask Susan how her teacher was. Then we’d listen for forty minutes to the wonders of the handsome Mr. Blake, who understood young women perfectly even if he didn’t try to publish babyish books for them.
“I can’t, Garber. Really.”
“Well, next week then. We’ll do it next week.”
“Love to.”
“Anyway, you promised to read Greta tonight.”
Damn.
“You will read it, Mary?”
“I’ll read it.”
He kissed me good-bye, giving me one of those measuring glances that always seem out of character. I just missed the subway. While I was waiting for the next one, a thin anemic-looking kid pushed another one of the poison-green leaflets into my hand. C-AUD: A DEAD END FOR HUMANITY. I tore it into little pieces, threw it on the subway tracks, and got slapped with a fine for malicious littering.
“I got a D,” Susan announced over the spaghetti. She widened her eyes at me and held her fork upright, like a spear. “Ms. Lugo gave me a D.”
“Ms. Lugo? What happened to Mr. Blake?”
Susan rolled her eyes heavenward. “I told you, he’s been out because his mother died. Ms. Lugo is the sub. And she gave me a D on my family-tree assignment!”
“Why?”
“You should know! It’s your fault!”
“My fault?”
“You know it is. And when Mr. Blake comes back on Friday, he’ll see that D and ask me about it, and I just can’t bear it!”
I twirled spaghetti on my fork with great, calm deliberation. “And just how is this D my fault, Susan?”
“We’re suppose to have all this oral history to go with the family tree we had to do. I told you. And all I had to put on my cassette was those things you told me about Grandpa Garber, because you were so busy writing or whatever that you wouldn’t hardly even talk to me. So Ms. Lugo marked “skimpy content” and “lack of effort” on the checklist and gave me a D.”
“Honey, it wasn’t because I was too busy writing!”
“Don’t call me ‘honey’ ! I hate it when you call me ‘honey’ !”
Twice in one day. I put down my fork and forced myself to speak calmly to the hysterical, overgrown prosecutor sitting in my daughter’s chair. J’accuse.
“Susan, it wasn’t because I was too busy writing. It wasn’t that at all. It was because . . .” Because what? Because the family tree I gave her was Garber’s, and I don’t know any more about it. Because I don’t know what her father, that anonymous donor of sperm, might have had for his oral history. Because I don’t want to give her mine, don’t want her to look at herself as the cast-off granddaughter of a rich bitch whose notorious cruelties revolted even the mostly unrevoltable set that spawned her. Because I don’t want Susan to look at me in the lurid and violent light that any recitation of my own childhood would have to, in Susan’s eyes, set me in now and forever, world without end.
“Because of what?” Susan demanded. “Because of what didn’t you tell me more for the project?”
I couldn’t answer her.
Two large tears rolled out of the corners of her eyes. She jumped up, dashed them away, and screamed at me across the spaghetti. “You don’t have a reason! You know you don’t! You just don’t care if I get a D on my project, you just don’t have time to talk to me about it, you just have time to lock yourself in your room and scribble your own things! You don’t understand me at all!”
She ran from the room. A second later I heard the door slam, catch on something in the way, then slam again, this time successfully enough to shake the pictures on the wall.
Victoria Falls shuddered and slid to the floor.
I pushed away the plate of congealing spaghetti. All right, I told myself again, it’s just normal preadolescent mother-daughter wangling. Her body’s under a lot of stress, it’s changing too fast, this is all normal, the tears, the lightning highs and lows—all would pass. I understood. Didn’t I? I did. I had been that age once; I knew what it felt like to be Susan with her
“D” or Nellie Kay Armbruster with her fashion braids; I knew what—
No. I didn’t know what it felt like. Not from where Susan was standing. I only knew what it had looked like from where I had been, such a vastly different and splintered place that I’d been an emotional mutant, adapted to fit an alien landscape, and thus alone. I couldn’t reach my daughter that way, through the tunnel of a common experience. There wasn’t one. My childhood was useless for that.
But I could do something else with that childhood, and had been doing it, for months now. I could transform the whole abusive nightmare into something that made sense, perhaps even beauty. Dickens had done it for his childhood of grinding poverty, in Oliver Twist. Rashi had done it for hers, in Gremlin. If the private past could be transcended, transformed into the public vision . . .
I left the spaghetti on the table. I left the unread copy of Greta on the floor, next to Victoria Falls. I left the fine for malicious littering of the poison-green pamphlet in my coat pocket. I left Garber’s mysterious worry about Jameson’s mysterious worry, and Susan’s worry about her D, and my worry about Susan, and I went into my bedroom and scribbled some more on the secret manuscript I had been scribbling on every night. The manuscript that I knew would make it all hang together, turn it all into some kind of integrated sense, make it all worthwhile.
I wrote until I fell asleep, sometime after two, still slumped at my desk. When I woke a few hours later, the light cube had burned out. My shoulders and arms felt stiff, circulation had stopped in one leg, and my mouth tasted foul. It was nearly dawn. In the half-light from the window my writing lay lightly on the crumpled pages, a lacy pattern of dim shadows.
AND SO LITTLE AGNES CAME HOME AGAIN, MUCH THE WISER FOR HER ADVENTURE. AND HER MOTHER MET HER AT THE DOOR, AND HER LOVING BROTHERS, AND, BEST OF ALL, TAGS. HE BARKED AND ROMPED, AND LITTLE AGNES KNEW SHE COULD NEVER, EVER LEAVE HIM AGAIN!