Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Hal came in, yawning. While having coffee and breakfast and reading the paper, they looked out at dark clouds, driven by high winds, and counted the cars that passed, only five in the next two hours. People with jobs were already at work, and the neighbors didn’t need to use this stretch of road at all. There were a dozen ways to reach the highway without passing this place, and she was sure the grapevine had suggested to everyone that they do precisely that.

  Hal remarked, “We could clear them out of there. The new harassment law’s specific about that.”

  “I know. But why waste our time? What would be the point? You always told me the Army of God is made up of rank-and-file zealots, interchangeable mob-components, spitters, and stone throwers.”

  “Even mob-components can be dangerous. It’s good the alarm guys will be here to finish wiring the house this afternoon.”

  The men showed up about eleven, just as the picketers were departing. With no audience, with rain squalls passing through every few minutes and grit-laden winds gusting up to forty and fifty miles per hour, the Army of God had had enough.

  The security men worked through the afternoon. As he was leaving that evening, the foreman commented to Carolyn, “I hate to tell you, or maybe you know. Your phone is bugged.”

  “My phone!”

  “The one in that office there, and all the extensions. It’s got a real good little gadget hooked up where the line comes into the house. You want me to remove it?”

  He seemed sympathetic about it, but only slightly curious. For him it was all-routine, she supposed. In his world people spied on people all the time. Carolyn shook her head slowly. “No. Leave it. I’d rather find out who did it, and I can do that best by leaving it in place.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I believe so. That’s not the line I use much, anyhow. Would you check the other phone for me?”

  “I only saw one line—”

  “I know. The other one was the original house phone fifty years ago, before they put in the new cables. It comes into the back of the house from across the river.”

  He checked the phone in the room Carolyn was using and declared it clean, then sold her a little gadget that would tell her if anyone fooled with it. When he left, she sat staring at the needle on the dial, musing for a long time. How long ago had the house phones been bugged? During the visit that Leonegro had almost put an end to? Or before that? When the spotty-faced kid had broken in? He could have installed the gadget, then decided to try a break-in. Possibly. What had she said over that phone during the last few days? Not much. There’d been the call from Jessamine. She’d said what? Libido epidemic, something. Would the mysterious phone bugger be interested in the fact she knew there was such a thing? She’d talked about Sophy’s still being around. And she’d had a call from an old friend in Chicago who’d wanted information on the Santa Fe Opera. Did the bugger care about that? And they’d called Mike Winter, at the FBI! Where had Hal called from?

  Her throat loosened after a moment. Hal had made the call from her bedroom phone. And why hadn’t she herself thought of being bugged? Out of desire not to appear paranoid, perhaps. She’d been aware of danger, but too self-consciously diffident to take strong action!

  No more, she promised herself, blood hammering painfully in her temples. No more.

  Stace told Luce about the epidemic when he got home from work Tuesday night.

  After a long silence he licked his lips. “How long has it been going on?”

  “Mom said maybe for two or three years. But only recently everywhere. Like that curve, you know, the one that starts out shallow and all of a sudden goes through the top of the graph.”

  “An asymptote,” he murmured. “Once you’re halfway, you’re as good as there.” He shook his head in disbelief.

  She said, “Somebody’d better be figuring out what’s happened before it’s too late to make babies anymore.”

  He laughed, a hacking gasp, without humor. “It’s like hard science fiction.” He gestured upward, at his tightly packed bookshelves. “You got a problem? Somebody better figure it out, maybe build a machine to solve it. You got a situation? Somebody’ll invent something to handle it. That’s the plot of a thousand stories. Like the Manhattan Project, back during World War Two. Or NASA, putting a man on the moon.”

  “Luce.…”

  “You know, Stace. I’m part of a generation of kids, boys mostly, that was raised to believe there’s no problem we can’t solve; that somebody—some elite—will always come up with something. Population’s outgrowing food supply? Someone will think of something. Got an epidemic? Someone will find a way to cure it. We don’t need to change people so long as somebody can come up with a technical fix!”

  Her lips twisted, almost a sneer. “Of course you mean someone else?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. It’s got to be somebody else, some elite. The people who create the problem won’t solve it. Maybe they could, but they won’t. Miners and manufacturers and lumbermen believe destroying the earth is acceptable because it means jobs. Every mommy and daddy thinks it’s other people who are overpopulating the world, not their third and fourth and fifth kids. Half the world’s species are extinct; the rest soon will be. Not their worry. Someone else has to solve things.”

  “But, my God, Luce. It does have to be somebody else. I can’t solve problems like that. We can’t.”

  “I know,” he whispered. “I knew in my gut it was something like this! I knew! All of us, we’ve got ourselves into a mess, so we’re expecting somebody else to get us out. But what if it’s like AIDS? What if they can’t?”

  So far, at least, they couldn’t. Luce was quite right. Around the world a thousand labs went on the equivalent of a wartime footing, around-the-clock shifts doing genetic analysis, attempting to determine what had happened to mankind. Tight-lipped people everywhere were asking the same questions. Pathologists were doing exhaustive studies of every dead body they could lay hands on, looking for difference. There were some obvious changes. Women’s breasts had shrunk, leaving only gentle curves to indicate femininity. External genitalia, both male and female, were much smaller. Women’s hips and thighs had become less fleshy. Though neither ovaries nor testes showed any signs of atrophy, neither were they making reproductive cells, and erectile tissue no longer functioned. Men previously bald were now growing hair. If there were brain changes, they were too small to be easily detected in persons living or dead. Was it a virus? A retrovirus? Was it a genetic change? A spontaneous mutation? In response to what? Had individuals changed hormonally, biologically, chemically? To find genetic changes, current men would have to be compared to their former selves, but full genetic inventories did not exist for their former selves. There were, however, lots of men and a few women in tanks. Some of them were biopsied, then wakened, then assayed again a few weeks later, but answers could not be expected to come quickly. With all those allelic variations, one’s genome might be quite eccentric and still be within the range of normalcy. Even with computers, comparing total genomes could take one hell of a long time and then yield only equivocal results.

  Hormone replacement was tried, without success. Recipients had serious, life-threatening allergic reactions to testosterone or estrogen. Whoever, whatever, was playing with humanity was at least one move ahead.

  While the laboratory staffs sweated and cursed, most of the world’s people either didn’t know or pretended not to. Those who suspected were tiptoeing through their days, hoping they were wrong. Some, the less noticing among humankind, those for whom sex had always been a sometime thing, thought they might be suffering from a touch of flu or a lack of sleep, a little indigestion, a fit of depression, each believing himself alone in that regard. Some, for whom sex had been a duty, felt relieved that the duty was no longer expected. One stand-up comic skated perilously close to mentioning it on nationwide TV, only to be shackled and led off by federal marshals, off camera.

  The ignorance wasn’t total. Certain grou
ps seemed to know something! Bag ladies knew something! The armies of marching men knew something! What they knew and what they intended were obscure, however, and seemed to bear little relationship to day-to-day life. It was almost as though those two groups were moved by something outside the everyday world, by some alien or spiritual force that was playing checkers across the earth, immune to the malaise felt by the rest of mankind.

  The rest of mankind, for whom the machinery of life ground on. Consumers went on consuming, though the pattern of their consumption was changing. Even without the depredations of the bag ladies, extreme fashions were not moving. Uncomfortable apparel or shoes were not selling. Auto showrooms suffered from a glut of expensive cars. More books were being read as many TV shows lost their audiences, particularly the trashy talk shows, the sexy soaps and sitcoms, and the late-night porns. The 900-number sex-talk lines were as dead as the spotted owl, the sea turtle, the elephant, the rhino, the gorilla …

  Individual sports equipment was in big demand; team competitive sports were sagging. The baseball season was in full swing, but stadiums were uncrowded and TV coverage went largely unwatched. Advertising was in chaos. Barbie and G.I. Joe had suffered a fatal decline; teddy bears, building blocks, roller blades, and bicycles went on as ever.

  Simon’s boss, after a behind-closed-doors conference with Simon, sent him on an around-the-world jaunt to investigate how far the plague had spread: from where, starting when. Nothing could be printed yet, but much could be learned that would be printed later.

  Simon’s nose led him almost immediately to one symptom of change: the divorce rate had skyrocketed. Couples were splitting by the hundreds of thousands. They were dispassionately, casually, going their separate ways without rancor. Men who had beaten their wives regularly, constantly, who had threatened them with death if they tried to escape, now yawned as they watched them go. In India arranged marriages had simply ceased, as had the burning of brides. In the Sudan parents were not having their daughters’ external genitalia cut off, as had been the tradition for centuries.

  Among some religious groups all these changes, those that were known and those that were suspected, were cause for grave concern. For millennia religious power and prestige had been built on a foundation of sexual proscription. Now the sudden absence of sex came like the surgeon’s knife, abbreviating both doctrine and doctrinaire. What were sin fighters to do without the favorite sin? Without traditional lusts, what good were traditional values? There were secret meetings, covert assemblies, men working deep into the night as they sought to confound whatever devil had been so presumptuous as to purify humanity without first asking permission from its moral advisers.

  In India a Hindu prophet claimed that in the future all men would be reborn as something other than humans because men had been too destructive of other life and now must learn to respect other forms by living in other shapes. Since all humans were to be reincarnated in other forms, human babies were no longer needed. The Hindu prophet was assaulted by a Muslim prophet, who claimed that the Hindus had caused whatever was going on. The Muslim prophet was counterattacked by a Buddhist, and everyone retired bloody from the field of battle with injuries more symbolic than fatal. Accounts of this brouhaha were heavily censored before publication.

  June moved toward its end. The Vatican, with much pious misdirection, canceled planned visits of His Holiness to various parts of the world and announced instead a conference of all bishops for early autumn, the first in many years. The cardinals, still conservative but now neuter to a man, were at a loss. Everywhere the Church was preoccupied, even in Louisiana, where the archbishop was too busy worrying about survival to think about the oyster farms. The question of support for the Church’s secret project was not renewed.

  The date for the trial of Lolly Ashaler was only days away. According to the quickie phone-in TV polls, long a staple of the twitchy titillations that had taken the place of the evening news, the vast majority of persons felt Lolly Ashaler should be found guilty and executed. Carolyn, hearing this nonsense, wondered whether people had been paid to call in anti-Lolly responses or whether the station had been paid to announce a totally false result. According to the media, feeling was running high against Lolly, but Carolyn hadn’t noticed any such run of opinion. The rumored hostility and anger was only reported, not apparent.

  One aspect of the coverage, however, Carolyn found deeply disturbing. According to some editorial pages and some talk shows, Lolly had killed not just a baby but “the future of mankind.” The Santa Fe paper editorialized that “the current desperation of humanity” had been Lolly’s fault, she had committed “the final sin,” had added “the spiritual last straw” to the sin burden of mankind. While “the current desperation” was undefined, Sodom and Gomorrah were mentioned in passing, along with the Flood. Carolyn saw a coordinated effort in all this, no doubt on Jagger’s behalf. Seemingly, even if the world died tomorrow, Jagger intended to stand with one foot atop the corpse declaring himself victorious.

  “The world situation was the girl’s fault?” asked Ophy when Carolyn called her—on the bedroom phone—to discuss testimony and strategy. “Where do they get that idea?”

  “The morning paper printed it, but I imagine Jagger or one of his minions came up with the idea: Lolly has so offended God by killing her child that God is punishing the entire human race by withholding babies. This time it won’t be by flood, or by fire. It’ll just be extinction. Which, if you’re an environmentalist, must seem like divine retribution. Maybe the Gaia hypothesis has some truth to it.”

  Carolyn rubbed at her forehead, staring at the papers on her desk, which would be exhibit something or other in the upcoming trial. She was so tired she couldn’t think.

  “I suppose the guilt can be wiped away by blood sacrifice,” Ophy growled.

  “That may be the reasoning behind Jagger’s going for murder one with the possibility of the death penalty. He wants to prove she intended all along to kill the baby. She’s to be the scapegoat: If we spill the blood of this bad, bad woman, God will relent.”

  “You sound weary, Carolyn.”

  “Lately I feel that I’m living in a badly written, badly directed foreign movie that’s running on late-night TV in black-and-white with lots of static and inadequate subtitles. It’s extremely difficult to follow, just like this trial.”

  “What is he pushing it for?”

  “I don’t know. Before this libido plague came up, I thought I knew what Jagger was up to: pure ambition. Now I can’t figure the guy. If he knows what’s going on—and even with the news blackout he has to know what’s going on!—why does he want public office? I can’t imagine any sane person wanting public office right now. Being in charge of anything would be hell.”

  Ophy laughed. “Didn’t we read something in college about preferring to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven? And then, too, I keep thinking about Sophy’s story where Elder Sister was supposed to be weaving a new medicine bag.…”

  Silence at the other end.

  “Carolyn?”

  “I’m here. If one weren’t modern and scientific and skeptical, one could certainly believe somebody was fixing us.”

  The following morning Carolyn was finally overrun by the media. The TV stations couldn’t get their trucks past the new electric gate, but they came trudging down the driveway, nonetheless, cameras and recorders at the ready. The assault turned into a rout when Hector, Fancy, and Fandango came boiling out of the house in full cry, to be joined by Leonegro. The resultant reportorial scatter bore some resemblance, Carolyn thought, to a flock of startled leghorn hens, taking off in all directions.

  “Down at the road, they ask for somebody. What I say?” asked Carlos when he arrived for work.

  Carolyn had spent several sleepless nights thinking her way through this question. “Say Ms. Crespin will send a statement to the gate in a few minutes.”

  “Ms. Crespin?”

  “My lawyer name, Carlos. Here on t
he farm I’m Mrs. or Ms. Shepherd, but when I’m a lawyer, I’m Ms. Crespin.”

  “You don’t have to say anything, you know,” Hal commented.

  “I know. But if I don’t at least make a statement, I’ll come across as hiding something. Better get it over with.”

  She went into the office and took a few moments to write out a statement: Lolly Ashaler felt she would be more comfortable with a female attorney; the American system presumes innocence until proof of guilt; Ms. Crespin presumed her client was, indeed, innocent. She ran a dozen copies of it and sent Carlos to distribute them to the newsmen.

  The statement, reduced to a fifteen-second bite, was on the evening news, followed by an oleaginous Jagger, who said it was rumored that some feminist organization had hired Ms. Crespin to defend the baby killer. Everyone knew that’s what feminists were interested in. Ms. Crespin, so he said, was from a big eastern liberal Catholic family, but it was rumored she’d repudiated the faith in which she’d been reared. She’d belonged to a reportedly subversive group, too, he’d been told. Of course, that’s when she was younger, and it might not mean anything.

  There was also an interview with Emmet Swinter, who said he knew for a fact that Ms. Crespin had been picketed by the Army of God for her unholy secular-humanist views. Which explained the reason for that.

  “Wow,” Stace commented when Carolyn phoned her. “Now you’re a backsliding Catholic, a feminist, a liberal, and a subversive who’s been picketed by the righteous.”

  “It’s no more than I expected,” Carolyn replied dully. It was no more than she’d expected, but it still hurt, in the way a sudden blow hurts, as much from surprise as from trauma. “Actually, the tone is somewhat milder than I feared. Someone must have told Jagger to tone it down. By the way, the office phone is bugged, so when you need me, call me on the one in my bedroom.”