The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  Six women were grouped around a long table in the atrium, a glass-covered enclosure crowded with tropical plants. The air felt soft and moist. An artificial stream flowed over stones set into the back wall and splashed into a tiled pool where water lilies bloomed. Philodendrons twined along the rafters, and banks of orchids bloomed in the corners. Ferns hung over the table, and potted palms rose gracefully from wicker baskets. Madrone stood still for a moment, inhaling the scents of damp earth and dripping leaves. She had hungered so for the sound of running water. For a moment, she felt that she would give anything, betray anyone, to stay in that cool green room and never be thirsty again.

  Mary Ellen had exchanged Madrone’s uniform for clothes she called more suitable. They seemed to Madrone to reflect somebody’s fantasy of a revolutionary, or perhaps more of a colonial explorer: designer jungle fatigues. The women at the table were slender and elegant in pale-colored dresses that set off the rose and lilac undertones of their light skin. It was strange to see so many very pale women all gathered together, like a bed artificially devoted to one variety of flower. Madrone felt like a sagebrush in a garden of lilies.

  Gold-edged china and cut-glass crystal goblets were set at each place, and vases overflowed with scented flowers. And the food! Not acorn mush and honey but crisp salad and vegetables, chicken in delicate sauce, fresh-baked bread, and, for dessert, sweet little cakes with sugar icing. The smells alone nearly knocked Madrone over.

  Throughout the meal, the other women chatted among themselves, occasionally stealing a curious glance at Madrone but not drawing her into the conversation. She was grateful to be left alone; it took all her concentration to eat slowly and remember her manners.

  When the cakes were finished and the women sat sipping tea from rose-patterned cups, Sara motioned them to silence.

  “We have a very special guest today, ladies,” she said. “As you may know, twenty years ago when the Stewards’ Party consolidated its power, isolated areas broke away. Our guest is from one of those areas, from the North. She is down here at great personal risk and sacrifice, and I have asked her to speak to us about the social conditions of her area.”

  All eyes focused on Madrone. Slowly, she set down her teacup and looked around the room. When she focused on their faces, they became distinct individuals. Now she noticed differences of dress and age and expression.

  “My name is Madrone,” she began. By habit, she was starting to sign her words as she spoke them, as she would in a Council meeting. But the ripple of discomfort that passed over the women’s faces reminded her that they were not accustomed to the signs, so she placed her hands in her lap. The women were nervous enough already, the scent of fear was an acrid tinge under the sweet smells of perfume and flowers and cake and tea. “I come from San Francisco, which we sometimes call Hierba Buena, or Gum Sahn, or simply the City. I work there as a healer—a doctor, you would say—and I’m down here to offer service to those who are opposing the rule of the Stewards.”

  “They have women doctors in the North?” one woman exclaimed.

  “In the North, a woman can do any kind of work she wants to do and is trained for.”

  An excited buzz went around the room, which was ended by an older woman, whose gray cap of hair crowned a thin, pinched face.

  “I was a doctor,” she said. “No, I am a doctor. The Stewards can take away a license, but they can’t remove my knowledge and skill. So don’t act like a woman doctor is a zebra, for Jesus’ sake. It’s not such an exotic thing to be.”

  “Thank you, Beth,” Sara interrupted smoothly. “Madrone, please go on.”

  “Where I come from, we believe there are Four Sacred Things,” Madrone began.

  “Like the Four Purities of the Millennialists?” queried a small woman with delicate bones.

  “What are they?” Madrone asked.

  “Moral Purity, Family Purity, Racial Purity, and Spiritual Purity.”

  “Not exactly,” Madrone said. “The Four Sacred Things are earth, air, fire, and water. Nobody can own them or profit from them, and it’s our responsibility to heal them and take care of them. That’s the basis of our politics and our economy.”

  This sparked a new round of questions, and once again Madrone found herself telling what she had come to think of as her fairy tale.

  “Everybody has enough food and water. Everybody has a place to live and care when they’re sick. It’s hard, sometimes, because we’ve had so many die from the epidemics. There’s still so much to heal, in the earth and the waters. But we share, and we have enough. Because everybody works, and works hard. No one is supported just for being …” She hesitated, aware she was about to say something that might offend these women, but Sara chimed in.

  “Being ornamental?”

  “Or of a certain race or class or parentage,” Madrone added.

  “But how do you force people to work when they don’t want to?”

  “We don’t. People want to work, just as naturally as a child wants to walk and talk. Everybody wants to make some contribution.”

  “And if someone doesn’t?”

  Madrone shrugged. “Someone who really didn’t want to work could survive on a basic stipend, but it wouldn’t allow for many luxuries. Sometimes people are sick and can’t work, or they have a ch’i deficiency and don’t have much energy. Then we try to heal them. Sometimes people don’t like a particular kind of work, but there’s always something else to be done. I can’t imagine healthy people not wanting to do anything. They’d be terribly bored, and isolated, and shamed. We’d probably send them to the mind healers.”

  “That’s different,” said the woman next to Madrone. “Here we have to corral them into farm camps and bribe them with increased water rations to get them into the factories. And still most of them would rather beg than work.”

  “Spare us your prejudices, Judith,” Beth said. “Don’t you know that for every open job there’s fifty who want one and can’t get one?”

  “I know you like to believe that, but I’ve been advertising for a new gardener’s boy for the last month and only had one applicant, who couldn’t read and didn’t know shit from a shovel, if you’ll pardon my language.”

  “I won’t,” Beth said. “Although it’s not your profanity I object to but the ignorance behind it. How can we expect the lower classes to learn to read when the schools we provide for the poor are nothing but Millennialist indoctrination camps? And what are you offering to pay your gardener? A pittance and a few swallows of water? Have you tried offering a living wage?”

  “Please, ladies!” Sara said. “Our guest has limited time with us. We have the rest of our lives to argue with each other.”

  “And that’s about the most we’re capable of doing,” Beth grumbled, but she sat quietly as a woman at the end of the table addressed Madrone.

  “What about the dirty, nasty jobs? Who picks up the garbage?”

  “Every household has its own compost. And collecting the papers and bottles and recyclable things—a lot of people think that’s a really fun job. You get to circulate around the neighborhood, catch up on all the gossip. But the unpopular and dangerous things, like toxic cleanups—first we put out on the computer nets that we need volunteers. If we don’t get them, we choose them by lottery, from those who owe gift work to the region. You see, we each are obligated for a certain number of hours of gift work each year. Mostly, you can choose what you want to do. Or if you have a very vital skill, like being a healer, you can do it in your own specialty. Personally, in good years, when there’s no epidemics, I like to do something different, for a change. Tree planting or fruit picking, something outdoors and physical.”

  “So what you have,” Beth said, “is the perfect communist society. I thought those theories were discredited back in the nineties.”

  “No, we don’t,” Madrone said. “For one thing, we could debate whether Marxist theory was discredited or simply its particular twentieth-century implementations; it’s a dis
cussion some people like to go on about endlessly. Are you familiar with Moraga’s Theory of the Limitations of Complexity, for example?”

  “No,” Beth admitted.

  “She’s an economist who’s also well versed in the principles of chaos theory. To put it simply, she says the old giant state socialist countries like the Soviet Union failed because they attempted too much control over too much complexity. She makes the same criticism of much twentieth-century technology. And she traces it back to the mechanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, which saw nature as a great machine, something we could ultimately know and completely control.” You’re laying it on a bit thick, Madrone told herself, but she was enjoying herself, watching the expressions change from a slight air of condescension to outright astonishment. More than that, she thought, as she caught a spark in the eyes of Beth and one or two others, I’ve been as hungry for this as for vegetables: talk, discussion, something to stretch the mind more than the question of which ridge to cross next.

  “I would love to talk with you more about that,” Beth said, “but I suspect what these ladies most want to know is how your system functions.”

  “We don’t have centralized control of the economy, although we do have as much coordination as possible. We don’t have production quotas, for example. Work groups set their own goals and run their own affairs and barter in the markets for credits. But we’ve come to understand wealth and account for it in different ways. Marx said that wealth came from labor, but we say there are three different sources, and labor is only one, the most variable. There is also the stored labor of the past: for example, a house that was built a generation ago, or my grandmother’s English bone china. That sort of wealth should also be shared fairly, not hoarded up in a few families. And finally there’s wealth that is based on the resources of the earth, on the Four Sacred Things, and that wealth no one can profit from individually.”

  “Do you use money?” the woman next to her asked.

  “Our credits function like money, but they’re not backed by gold or silver. They’re backed by energy, human and other sorts, and our basic unit of value is the calorie. So a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production, in terms of labor and fuel and materials that themselves require energy to produce. And part of that accounting is how much energy it takes to replace a resource that is used. Something that works with solar or wind power becomes very cheap. Anything requiring irreplaceable fossil fuels is generally too expensive to think about.”

  “But do you have rich and poor?” the same woman asked.

  “We’re each guaranteed a share of the wealth of the past and of the resources, which translates into a basic stipend of credits. As I said before, you could live on that, frugally, if you really didn’t want to work. But if you do work, you earn work credits, and the more you work the more you earn, so there’s incentive for those who want personal advancement. And if you do something really spectacular, achieve something fabulous, people bring you gifts.”

  “Don’t people cheat?” asked a woman at the end of the table.

  “All the accounts are public. Your whole work group sees the bill you put in each week, and believe me, they know if it’s accurate. If not, you’ll hear about it, and if necessary they’ll bring it up before your Guild or Council. Of course, some jobs don’t lend themselves to counting hours, like mine, or like being an artist or a musician. We get a fixed stipend.”

  “But how do you keep track of these credits? Do you have a computer system?” Beth asked.

  “A very sophisticated one,” Madrone said. “It’s based on silicon crystals we grow from sea water. The tecchies direct their formation by visualization. It’s a very specialized skill, and not everyone can learn to do it.”

  “So you have an advanced technology. You’re not a primitive Utopia,” Sara said.

  “We’re not a Utopia at all, and our technology is as advanced as it can be, given our limitations and the general depletion of resources. But we’ve had to make some hard choices. After the Uprising, every tool and device and process was reevaluated according to the Five Criteria of True Wealth that Latasha Burton developed.”

  “Which are?” Beth asked.

  “Usefulness. Sustainability—meaning that it must generate or save as much energy as it consumes and doesn’t depend on nonrenewable resources. Beauty. Healing for the earth, or at least not being destructive. Nurturing for the spirit. Private automobiles failed, for example. They’re certainly useful and many people maintained that they can be beautiful, but they weren’t sustainable. Computers based on our new crystals passed, and the Net we created also provides communication, news, accounting, lots of things. We’ve also made advances in solar and wind power and small-scale agriculture. Some industries disappeared—there are no vidsets or widescreens because we couldn’t support the infrastructure they needed. Others had to change. We print a lot of books, but we make paper from hemp, not from trees.”

  “What about women’s work? Do you have servants who clean your houses and mind the children?” Judith asked.

  “We all do that sort of work, not just women but men too. And it’s all paid for. Every household gets credits for a certain number of working hours per person, for home maintenance and for child care, or care of anyone who might need it. You can trade those credits around any way you like—keep them if you do your own work or assign them to somebody else if you’d rather get someone else to do it for you. And there are usually some people around, like students, who want to pick up a few credits without having to commit to a work group.”

  “And marriage?” Sara asked.

  “That’s a personal arrangement between the people involved. Sometimes it’s based on their religion, if they belong to one that has rules about those things. But it’s no longer an economic arrangement. If a woman—or a man—wants to stay home and take care of the house and the kids, they’d collect all those work credits and they’d be valued just as much as for work done outside the home, because all work is valued the same.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean a healer’s work isn’t worth more per hour than a farmer’s or a teacher’s. Oh, we kick it around in Council all the time, there’re endless debates about it, but it always comes down to the fact that our system cannot work if we start to say one person’s work or skill is worth more than somebody else’s. An economic system is like an organism, and to function all its parts are necessary.”

  “So divorce is legal?” Sara asked.

  “Isn’t it legal here?”

  “It’s a sin,” Sara said, and Madrone thought her voice sounded somewhat wistful. “You lose your immortal soul. Unless you have money for an offering to secure a dispensation.”

  “Which women never have on their own,” Beth said. “Only the men.”

  “Some men,” Judith said. “Not most men. Even well-off men are rarely that rich.”

  “It’s not legal or illegal back home,” Madrone said. “We don’t have a whole lot of laws about those things. It’s just up to the people involved. Unless there’s some sort of problem they can’t agree about—say, if they have kids and they can’t agree who will take them. Then they have to bring in a Mediator or take it to their Neighborhood Council.”

  “So a man can just leave his wife for someone younger or better looking?”

  “If that’s what he wants to do. Or she can leave him, for a better-looking man. Or woman. But she doesn’t depend on him for her living, so she’s never left without support.”

  “The argument here,” another woman said, “is that the Moral Purity laws protect women. Without them, men would just run wild, raping women on the streets.”

  “Whereas with the laws,” Beth said, “men have women in their own privately stocked reserves, one for the wife, one for the mistress, one for anything or anyone they care to order from the catalogs.”

  “Don’t you have a lot of rape and perversion?” a woman asked, ignoring Beth’s comment.


  “We don’t have any perversion.”

  “Oh, come,” Beth said. “Every human society on the face of this earth has had homosexuality.”

  Madrone laughed. “We have plenty of that. Is that what’s considered perversion?”

  “Among other things. What about incest and child molesting?”

  “We don’t have the kind of social isolation that breeds it. We have a lot of different kinds of families. Some of us grow up in big collectives, like I did. Some are in extended families, with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents; some in small nuclear families. But we make sure that no family is isolated. The Neighborhood Councils form support groups of people from different kinds of households and backgrounds—to give different perspectives. So every kid has half a dozen aunties and uncles from the time they’re tiny. They’re encouraged to talk about things, to ask for help, to protect themselves. And we train all our children, early on, in self-defense, both girls and boys. Oh, I’ve read a lot about incest and child abuse, but we don’t have the climate of secrecy and shame that lets it go on for any length of time. I’m not saying it never happens, but nothing supports it. The same with rape. Our men aren’t raised to believe they have the right to rape. In fact, we consider it the most shameful, degraded thing a man could do.”

  “What if it does happen?” the small woman asked.

  “If it does? First, everybody in his family would talk to the person and tell him how shocked and horrible they feel. So would his compas, his friends and lovers, his Guild or Council, his Neighborhood Council, maybe the whole City Council. He wouldn’t be welcome in anybody’s house, or work group, or to eat with anybody. The mind healers might take him in if he wanted to get better—but it would take him years to regain people’s trust. Maybe he’d have to go off to the hills to live with the Wild Boar People, the ones who can’t fit into society.”

  “And if he won’t go? How do you make him? Do you have police?”

  “We find it’s better not to assign that role to any one group of people. For one thing, they generally aren’t around when you really need them, and for another, they tend to abuse their power. Instead, like I said, we’re all trained in self-defense, and as we get older we get more advanced Peacekeeper training—how to intervene in a heated conflict, how to restrain somebody. If there’s a fight, let’s say, which happens from time to time although it’s fairly rare, whoever happens to be around will take care of it. I did once see a man banished to go live with the Wild Boar People. He was yelling and fighting, but there were ten people around him and they got his arms into restraints. It was very upsetting to watch, although they didn’t hurt him. They put him on a fire truck, and I guess someone drove him up to the Sonoma Hills, where the Wild Boar People live by hunting feral pigs. Once you’re banished, your name and picture go out on the Net. Everybody knows who you are, and you can’t come back unless the City Council approves. For ten days in midwinter, though, we let some of the Wild Boar People come in to market to sell their pigs. But that’s all.”