“What’s that?”
“They amalgamated with the Unitarians. They’re all Unitarian Universalists now. And another ancestor was a cousin of Sam Adams. The point is, they were men of conscience.”
“For whatever that means.”
“For whatever that means.” I handed him the Asimov proposal. “Here, read. This is the relevant part.”
Rob read it several times. It said:
The Child as Young God. In this one we picture the society as possessing few children. If the average life expectancy has reached five hundred years, let us suppose, then the percentage of children should be, say, one-twentieth what it is now. In such a society biologic parenthood gives a person immense social prestige but no special rights in the child one has created. All children are children of society in general, with everyone anxious to share in the rights of mothering and fathering. The child is the Golden Boy/Girl of the neighborhood, and there is considerable distress if one of these children approaches adulthood without another child being born to take its place. This story can be poignant and young, for I see it told from the viewpoint of a child who is approaching adulthood and who doesn’t want to lose the Goldenness of his position and is perhaps jealous of another child on the way: sibling rivalry on a grand scale.
I stroked Wolf while Rob read. Wolf was puffing but not lying quietly. She batted at my hand. I picked up a pipe cleaner and wrapped it into a coil around my little finger and dropped it on the floor. Wolf pushed off my lap, seized the little woolly spring in her jaws, growled fiercely, and ran out of the study. When she isn’t batting them under the bookcases in the library and then fishing them out again, she loves to run from room to room with a pipe cleaner in her mouth, growling all the while. She’s very fierce.
Rob finished reading, looked up, and said, “It’s like something you’ve done, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“Rite of Passage.”
Rite of Passage was my first novel. It’s about a girl, a bright superchild on the verge of adulthood in a low-population future society. Otherwise it’s not much the same.
“Hmm. I guess I see what you mean, but I don’t think the similarity has to be close enough to be any problem. The thought of repeating myself is not what’s hanging me up. What do you think of the proposal?”
“Well,” said Rob, “when did you say the story is supposed to take place?”
I flipped to the front page of the proposal to check. “The next century. The only date mentioned is 2025. After 2025, I guess.”
“Fifty years from now? Where do all the five-hundred-year-olds come from?”
I waved that aside. “I’m willing to make it one hundred or one hundred and fifty plus great expectations.”
“These people would have to be alive now,” Rob said.
“True,” I said. “It’s something to think about.”
It was a good point, just the sort of thing I wanted Rob to come up with. It raised possibilities.
“Are there any restrictions on what you write?”
“Fifteen thousand words and no nasty language.”
“What about nasty ideas?”
“Nothing said about that, but I don’t suppose they are worried. Everybody knows I never had a nasty idea in my life.”
“Oh, yes. Um-hmm,” said Rob. “Look, I know this is a radical suggestion, but what’s wrong with writing the idea as it stands? There is a story there.”
“I know,” I said. “I thought of writing it for a long time, but then when I tried, I just couldn’t do it. That’s where I got hung up. I like the opening phrase. I like it—‘the child as young god.’ That’s provocative. It speaks to me. But what a distance to come for nothing. Sibling rivalry? Sibling rivalry? Why write it as science fiction? Why write it at all?”
“What’s the matter, Alex?” Rob said. “Are you yearning for relevance again?”
It’s a point of philosophical contention between us. Rob believes that all a story has to do is be entertaining.
I said, “Just read this.” And I picked the Whole Earth Catalog off Cory’s desk. I showed him their statement of purpose:
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.
“I’d like to speak to that,” I said. “I don’t have any final solutions. In fifteen thousand words I’m not going to lay out a viable and functioning and uncriticizable utopia, but for God’s sake, Rob, shouldn’t I at least try to say something relevant? As it is, I don’t think the chances are overwhelming that any of us are going to be alive in twenty years, let alone live to five hundred.”
“I know. You’ve said that before.”
“Not in print. If the society has solved the problems Asimov says—and we’re going to have to—that’s what I ought to write about, isn’t it? At the price of being relevant and not just entertaining. There is a story in the Asimov proposal that I want to write. Somewhere. And it isn’t about a kid who doesn’t want to grow up. I just have to find it.”
Rob said, “How do you propose to do it?”
“Sit and stare at the typewriter until it comes to me, I guess. Or putter in the garden.”
“Do you really have a garden?”
“Of course,” I said. “Tom Disch tells me that a half hour in the garden every day keeps the soul pure.” Tom’s another writer. We tend to pass basic tips like this around our little circles. “I’m going to try it and see what good it does me.”
“You do that,” said Rob. “And good luck. But I’ve got to hit the sack now. I’m about to drop off.”
I turned off my desk lamp. As I got up, I said, “By the way, just who is this kid, Juanito?”
Rob said, “He’s no kid. He’s your age.”
I wouldn’t have thought it. I’m pushing thirty. I said, “Who is he?”
“Who is he?” Rob grinned. He grins like that when he is about to say something that’s more entertaining than relevant. “He’s Juanito the Watcher. He’s your test of relevance. He’s watching and assessing. If you’re okay, that’s cool. But if you aren’t right, he’ll split without a word. Take your chances.”
“Thanks a lot, friend,” I said.
Rob went upstairs to flake out, and I walked down to the road to see if the mail had come. It had. My check hadn’t. Junk mail.
I sorted the mail as I walked up the long gravel drive to the farm, and I stopped off at the main house to leave Mrs. S. her share of the bills and fliers. I collected ducklings and a spade and set to work on the garden.
I was unhappy about the check not coming, so I lit into the work with a vengeance, turning sod and earth. The ducklings, twice their Easter-morning size but still clothed in yellow down, went reep-a-cheep and peep-a-deep around my heels and gobbled happily when I turned up worms for their benefit. They knew there was someone looking out for their welfare. I was wishing I knew as much.
Spring this year was wet and late, and the only thing in bloom was the weeping willow in the back yard, with its trailing yellow catkins. The trees spread over the running hills to the next farm were still winter sticks. The day was cool enough for a light jacket in spite of the work, and the sky was partly overcast. Gardening was an act of faith that the seasons would change and warmth and flower come. Gardening is an act of faith. I’m a pessimist, but still I garden.
It’s much like the times.
Our society is imperfect. That’s what we say, and we shrug and let it go at that. Societies change in their own good time, and there isn’t much that individuals can do to cause change or direct it. Most
people don’t try. They have a living to make, and whatever energies are left over they know how to put to good use. They leave politics to politicians.
But let’s be honest. Our society is not just imperfect. Our society is an unhappy shambles. And leaving politics to politicians is proving to be as dangerous a business as leaving science to scientists, war to generals, and profits to profiteers.
I read. I watch. I listen. And I judge by my own experience.
The best of us are miserable. We all take drugs—alcohol, tobacco, and pills by the handful. We do work in order to live and live in order to work—an endless unsatisfying round. The jobs are no pleasure. Employers shunt us from one plastic paradise to another. One quarter of the country moves each year. No roots, no stability.
We live our lives in public, with less and less opportunity to know each other. To know anybody.
Farmers can’t make a living farming. Small businessmen can’t make a living anymore, either. Combines and monoliths take them over or push them out. And because nobody questions the ways of a monolith and stays or rises in one, the most ruthless monoliths survive, run by the narrowest and hungriest and most self-satisfied among us.
The results: rivers that stink of sewage, industrial waste, and dead fish. City air that’s the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Countryside turned to rubble. Chemical lagoons left to stain hillsides with their overflow. Fields of rusting auto bodies.
And all the while, the population is growing. Progress. New consumers. But when I was born, in 1940, there were 140 million people in this country, and now there are more than 200 million, half of them born since 1940. Our institutions are less and less able to cope with the growth. Not enough houses. Not enough schools. Not enough doctors or teachers or jobs. Not enough room at the beach. Not enough beaches.
Not enough food. The world is beginning to starve, and for all the talk of Green Revolutions, we no longer have surplus food. We are importing lamb from Australia and beef from Argentina now. How soon before we all start pulling our belts a notch tighter?
And our country acts like one more self-righteous monolith. Policing the world in the name of one ideal or another. In practice supporting dictators, suppressing people who want fresh air to breathe as much as any of us, with just as much right. In practice taking, taking, taking, with both hands. Our country has six percent of the world’s population. We consume fifty percent of the world’s production. How long will we be allowed to continue? Who will we kill to continue?
And as unhappiness rises, crime rises. Women march. Blacks burn their slums and arm themselves. Kids confront. And nobody is sure of his safety. I’m not sure of mine.
All of us are police, or demonstrators, or caught in between. And there is more of the same to come.
Our society may be worse than a shambles. Certainly, in spite of the inventions, the science, the progress, the magic at our command, our problems are not growing less. Each year is more chaotic than the one before. Marches. Demonstrations. Riots. Assassinations. Crime. Frustration. Malaise. General inability to cope.
We are in a hell of a mess. And nobody has any solutions.
Head-beatings and suppression are not solutions. Barricades are no solution. Bloody revolutions merely exchange one set of power brokers for another.
But the problems we have are real and immediate. Those who are hungry, unskilled, jobless, homeless, or simply chronically unhappy, cannot be told to shut up. The 100 million of us who are young cannot be told to go away. The 100 million of us who are old cannot be ignored. The 20 million of us who are black cannot be killed, deported, or subjugated longer at any cost short of our total ruin as human beings. And so far we have no solutions. Merely the same old knee-jerk reactions of confrontation and suppression.
There may in fact be no solutions.
We may be on the one-way trip to total destruction. These may be the last years of the human race, or the last bearable ones that any of us will know.
In times like these, gardening is an act of faith. That the seasons will change and warmth and flower come. But it is the best thing I know to do. We do garden.
So I worked and thought—and thought about my story. And how we might get from this now of ours to a brighter future. I’d like to believe in one.
And so I worked. As wet as the spring had been, the ground I was turning was muddy, and I was up to my knees in it. And down on my knees. And up to my elbows. Finding worms for the ducklings when I could. Some of the mud—or its cousin—appears on the fourth page of this manuscript. If our printer is worth his salt, I trust it will appear in true and faithful reproduction when you read this. When and wherever you read this, a touch of garden.
After a time Alexander the gander came waddling over to investigate us, me and the ducklings. There is truth to the adage “cross as a goose.” There is also truth to the adage “loose as a goose,” but that is of no moment. Alexander lowers his head, opens his beak, and hisses like an angry iguana. He and I have struck a truce. When he acts like an iguana, I act like an iguana back, and I am bigger than he is, so Alexander walks away.
The ducklings don’t have my advantages, and Alexander began to run them around in circles. They peeped and ran, peeped and ran. Alexander was doing them no harm, but he was upsetting them mightily. They were too upset to eat worms, and that is upset.
After a few minutes of this I put down my spade and grabbed an armful of disgruntled goose. I held Alexander upside down and began to stroke his belly feathers. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. After a moment he became less angry. He ceased to hiss. His eyes glazed and began to tick, every few seconds a wave passing through like the wake behind a canoe. At last I set him back on his feet and Alexander walked dazedly away. He seemed bewildered, not at all certain of what had happened to him. He shook his little head and then reared back and flapped his wings as though he were stretching for the morning. At last he found a place in the middle of the gravel drive and stood there like a sentinel, muttering to himself in goose talk.
It’s what I call Upgraded Protective Reaction. I’d like to try it on our so-called leaders.
A sudden stampede of lambs back under the fence announced the return of Cory, Leigh, and Juanito from their walk to the State Park.
“Hello, love,” I said. “Did you see anything?”
Cory smiled widely. “We set up the whole herd down by Three Mile Run. They bounded across the valley, and then one last one like an afterthought trying to catch up.”
“Oh, fine,” I said in appreciation.
Leigh nodded, smiling too. She doesn’t talk a lot. She isn’t verbal. I am, so we talk some, just as Rob and I talk. But when she and Rob talk, she gestures and he nods, and then he gestures and she nods. She found a worm in my well-turned mud and held it at a dangle for the smaller duckling, who gobbled it down.
Cory said, “We’re going to have a look at Gemma’s kittens.”
“Good,” I said. “I think I’ve put in my half-hour here. I’ll come along.”
“Have you gone to the Elephant yet?”
“Oh,” I said. “It slipped my mind. I checked on the mail, though. The mail came.”
“What?”
“Nothing good,” I said. “Juanito, want to go to the Elephant with me?”
He really didn’t look my age. But then I don’t look my age, either.
“All right,” he said.
Cory and Leigh walked off toward the main house to have their look at the kittens. The ducklings hesitated and then went pell-melling after them wagging their beam ends faster than a boxer puppy.
“Now’s our chance,” I said.
But when Juanito and I got to the car, I remembered the truck tire.
“Just a minute,” I said, and took it out of the truck. “Let me put this away while I think of it. Grab your bottle.”
He fished the beer bottle from behind the spare tire where it had rolled. Then he followed me as I hefted the tire and carried it through the machine sho
p and into the tractor shed. I dumped the tire by the great heavy trash cans.
“Bottle there,” I said, pointing to a can, and Juanito set it on top of the trash like a careful crown.
“What’s going to happen to it?” he asked.
“When the ground dries, the farmer will take it all down and dump it in the woods.” Out of sight, out of mind.
“Oh,” he said.
We lumbered off to the Elephant in the old Plymouth. It was once a hotel, a wayside inn. Now it’s a crossroads store and bar. We shop there when we need something in a hurry. It’s a mile down the road. Everything else is five miles or more. Mostly more.
Juanito said, “Do you drive alone much?”
“Not much,” I said. “Cory can’t drive yet, so we go shopping together about twice a week.” I’m conscious of the trips to Doylestown and Quakertown because they so often cut into my writing.
“Whereabouts you from, Juanito?” I asked.
“Nowhere in particular these days,” he said. “I pretty much keep on the move. I stay for a while, and then I move on to the next place.”
“Always an outside agitator?” I asked, maneuvering to avoid a dead possum in the road. Possums like to take evening walks down the center of the highway.
“Something like that, I guess,” he said.
“I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I hitched across the country when I was eighteen, but I couldn’t take the uncertainty of always being on the move. I couldn’t work without roots and routine.”
On our right as we drove up the winding hill to the Elephant was a decaying set of grandstands.
“What is that?” asked Juanito.
“The Vargo Dragway,” I said. “On a Sunday afternoon you could hear them winding up and gearing down all the way back at the farm. They finally got it shut down last year. It took five years. It always seems to take them five years.”
I swung into the gravel parking lot beside the bar. They kept the bacon, eggs, and milk in the refrigerator behind the bar, so we went inside there rather than around to the store. There were two men drinking, but there was no one behind the bar, so we waited. Behind the bar are pictures and an old sign that says, “Elephant Hotel—1848,” around the silhouette of an elephant.
Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow Page 13