by Roger Elwood
“You may assume it, for purposes of polemic.”
“Then the matter is simple: you go and lift them off, then I go and look at the calendar, then I come back, then I tell you what I have seen.”
“Would you really be that large, that sweet, O my Andrei?”
“Why, certainly.” Andrei cuddled his left arm under his cheek, returning to repose.
Nora said: “I’m afraid, poor soul, it really is Tuesday.”
“Never mind,” said Elmo bitterly. “I can bear it.” He wrote, with many revisions, another sentence:
The third decade of the century was occupied with flappers and things were some messed up in China.
Tang—tong—tang! . . .
In the charge down to the dining room, they linked arms with the trio from the room next down the hall and arrived at the foot of the stairs in two orderly sections, three abreast, Elmo with Dina Samid and Andrei, then Nora and Marget Helversan with Axon Sten in the middle. This might have seemed hazardous for fat Aron, but actually his poise was the most exact, and his feet in white moccasins twinkled him downstairs with the precision of wheels under a cart. The company then formed a flying wedge and secured one of the tables in the glassed-in porch, partly by virtue of superior force, partly because of Andrei’s and Aron’s dignity as third-year students. Unlike Andrei, Aron was inclined to battle for his rights if he could do it sitting down. No fourth- or fifth-year students were involved; these rarefied beings occupied a sacrosanct table on the porch with the best view of the Nupal hills and were traditionally immune to homswoggling or ballock-busting except by each other. When Aron obEdard Sten reached fourth year, he would doubtless accept splendor as his due and wear the red beret proper to majors and seniors. Andrei would forget the beret half the time and kiss a freshman as soon as snap his fingers. At present, Aron was uneasy in the third-year position between millstones and spoke mildly, inquiring why Elmo looked like a wilted parsnip.
Elmo stated the problem as covered in the heads of his outline, I through I,A,1. “Why,” said Aron, “a simple matter of Snoke-feathers. Pluck them, child, at will. Bread’s wondrous, Lucy—you make it?”
Lucy Helversan waiting on table was Marget’s older commune-sister, now doing her labor fortnight. Elmo was reminded that his next full fortnight would be coming up soon—woodcutting, greenhouse, chicken farm, whatever—but not till after the Spring Orgy. He enjoyed the labor fortnights—beat studying, sometimes. Lucy nodded, pleased, and swung her bottom out of the way of Aron’s pinch.
“But look,” said Elmo, “suppose—something not Snoke-feathers—”
“Poor soul’s fevered,” said Aron, and touched Elmo’s forehead with little kind fingers. “As I feared. Frontal lobes near point of combustion. Sad, Been nice knowing him, though. Friendly, handsome.”
Elmo said: “Oh, shit.”
“What you felt there,” said Nora, “is backlash of a refiner’s fire. They have him under observation. They—I refer to our faculty, than whom—have begun to suspect him, even as we do, of possessing a brain. Now if even the Than-Whomers sense it, I think we ought to face it.”
“But surely,” said Andrei, “not charge him with it, not openly, not like this. A brain-user should be allowed to keep his habit secret and to proceed to the doctorate untainted by suspicion.”
“But,” said round-eyed Dina Samid, “everybody’s got brains, haven’t they? What for do you pick on Elmo?”
Nora met Elmo’s gaze across the ensuing silence and helplessly admitted: “I love her too. Maternally, sort of. Glands.”
“I know,” said Aron. “I feel it. Different glands, of course. I ponder, I study her, I try to understand, but my conclusion is that for those who love her as we do, Dina can be taken only on faith.”
“And what for,” said Margaret abEllan Helversan, her dark brows knitting, “do you pick on Dina? She does more than the rest of you to hold off the dullness of our times.”
Freshman Dina blushed, looking at her friend in adoration and bland bewilderment.
“My point exactly,” Aron burbled, but Marget scowled at him and Nora shushed him, remarking: “Hold off, Ancient—the darlings are at it again. I live for moments when Andrei gets cross.”
“The times are not dull,” said Andrei. “That’s a projection of teener discontent.”
“Teener I may be,” said sophomore Marget “and what are you, Andrei?—nineteen? But I think I know when I’m bored.”
“Ah, you run up against the elemental troubles that always plague intelligent beings—growing old some time, occasional sickness, death a certainty, frustration of desire outrunning performance, or merely of not getting something you want—all that oppresses you. Then you mistake frustration for boredom—real boredom is a sickness and quite a different thing, Marget—and you blame the times for something that’s inherent in the human condition.”
“You have to admit the times are smug,” said Marget. “We’re not going anywhere, not aiming at anything. You can’t suggest any kind of reform or change—people just look at you and go beh beh like a pack of constipated goats.”
Elmo began: “I think—”
“Herd, darling,” said Aron, “not pack. As for reform, or change, or originality of any kind, that’s always been the toughest proposition on earth. Even in bad times people hate the thought of changing anything, or reforming their ways.”
“And in good—” said Elmo.
“Or of entertaining any kind of original idea. In the famous revolutions of Old Time, the only method of change they could think of was to blast everything flat and cobble up something on the ruins with the same flaws.”
Elmo shouted: “Look out, everybody! I’m going to say something. I think the present age is a good one, and I think so because I’ve been reading history.”
“That’s my boy,” said Andrei.
“Everything just lovely, huh?” said Marget.
“I didn’t say that. But as for not going anywhere, not aiming at anything—look: we move in the time-stream because we must, but should we always be struggling to break off to some new place, some new or supposedly new way of doing things, when the present place might be the best one we can find? Under the given conditions? You want a return to atomic energy? After the radiation deaths of the Collapse and with all the devastated areas that won’t be fit for habitation for another thousand years, if then? Marget, you do sound like a fiftieth century progress-hound. All right, now you can sit back and call me a reactionary. Beh beh!”
Marget said: “I do. If we don’t go forward, we stagnate.”
“Said the three-plus billion of the fiftieth, word for word, while manufacturing more herbicides. It was a cliché even then, and it ended in the Collapse. They even noticed that if you rush forward in a hell of a hurry, it helps to look where you’re going. They just assumed, because so many bright-speaking, well-meaning spirits told them so, that everything was good if it was labeled progress.”
“Well,” said Dina Samid, “I do think lots of things nowadays are very nice. I mean, like sex for instance.”
“Sweetheart,” said Nora, “they did have sex in the fiftieth.”
“In fact,” said Aron, “as I remember my own ordeals in freshman and sophomore history under dear Dr. Mahew, that man of substance, indeed fatter than I am, there was an oft-repeated claim that sex was invented at some time during the fiftieth century. The claim has not been well established.”
“But,” said Dina, “they must have had it before then, mustn’t they, because I mean if they didn’t—well, how—”
Andrei spoke with controlled passion: “Aron, you can’t have it all to yourself: I love her too. Jasus, how I love her!”
“Why, Andrei!” said Dina. “You mean me? You never said.”
“Finish your punkin pie,” said Marget, “and ignore him.”
“Beh beh!” said Elmo, but Marget didn’t smile, much. “By the way, fellow creatures, I’ve thought of a way we can all make money.”
“He’s mad,” said Aron.
“A brain trust. Look, I’m always having magnificent ideas, each one easily worth a dola. So we form a company, let’s keep it down to just the six of us, and offer the general public a reliable supply of brilliant thoughts at one dola apiece. Millions in it, don’t you see?”
“Why, I think that’s wonderful,” said Dina. “You mean people would pay you money for thinking?”
“Precisely. We could even appeal to suckers outside the academic community. See how the money would roll in?”
“How much do you actually need?” Aron asked.
“Ten bucks.”
“Man’s hopelessly mad,” said Aron. “But Jesus said unto them, ‘A prophet—’ ”
“ ‘—is not without honor—’ ” said Marget.
Andrei said: “ ‘—save in his own country—’ ”
“ ‘—and in his own house,’ ” said Nora. “Matthew 13:57. And you have to be at choir practice in an hour, mad Elmo. Want to go over with Marget and me?”
“Must excuse.” To his own ears, Elmo sounded mean and sulky. “I go to compose malignant backscuttling therophiliac term paper, Dr. Clance obFrancis Mahew presiding.”
“Oh, balls, tenor section’s barely audible as it is,” Nora complained. “Last week I listened for the heaven-moment in that Dowland madrigal, and the tenors were damn-all out to lunch. Without your head-tones, my Elmo, the whole section will squizzle off ‘like snow upon the desert’s dusty face,’ Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat, forty-ninth century, I crap you not: this is a compliment; I love you.”
“Dearly beloved contralto,” Elmo snarled, “you go sing my part for me. The suet-heads will never know the difference.”
Nora said: “God, I wish you boys would quit blasting away at me in pentameter!”
Back at his desk, comfortably naked in the balmy air, Elmo began work by crossing out his last sentence, saddened by a conviction that Dr. Mahew would never consider flappers all that important; maybe he’d sneak them in last under Cultural Development. The first paragraph might do, if copied off in a fair hand. This he did, by the soft illumination of his student lamp. It was burning well tonight, with a nicely trimmed wick, the refined vegetable oil pleasantly pungent like incense. At his desk against the opposite wall, his back to the window, Andrei was using the electric light for cool and deliberate work on one of his architectural drawings. At home in that luminous world among the high-wrought absolutes of design, Andrei obMeredith Zenas never sweated or fidgeted. No scattering of energy: it all funneled into a concentration keen as the tip of his pencil. Yet he was not apart from the present world. The bright lamp beyond his head set forth his profile in gold-edged silhouette, magic to the eyes but sentient and human. He must have been aware of Elmo’s gaze, for while his hands still moved precisely with pencil and protractor, he was asking: “Term paper making headway?”
“Something more than Snoke-feathers. Fair to mimbling. I got to watching your hands.”
“I love you too.” Andrei completed the line.
“More than bird-wing,” said Elmo, and happier, he returned by slow stages to the fiftieth century, first transforming the dots over all his fs into sassy little square boxes. Then he wrote:
In the third and fourth decades of the fiftieth century breathing spells occurred in the world war, which appears to have been seldom recognized as one continuous event. The breathing spells, usually called “peace,” were interrupted by extensive butcheries, especially in regions called China and Spain and Abyssinia, some of these described as civil wars. (This term referred at that time to organized warfare confined within the boundaries of special territories known as “nations,” a concept that poses difficulty to the modem mind, although we need go back little more than a hundred years to find clear examples of the same phenomenon.) In the nation known to the fiftieth century as Germany, assassination was put on a basis of mass production. For this operation during the Rise of Hitler (term drawn perhaps from analogy of the rise of a bubble of marsh gas), the term “genocide” was coined some decades after the event, when public opinion became quite concerned about it. These upheavals (4919—4938) resemble the “hesitation cuts” found in suicides who die by the knife: impelled to self-destruction, but at first unable to make the decisive slash.
Mahew wouldn’t like that. Similes, flights of rhetoric—acceptable if Snokes or a like authority got there first, but hardly from a freshman. Elmo’s thought strayed, as he had known it would the moment his pen had touched that wound. Wound?—oh, fair enough word for what happens when a mind too young for defenses is cut by such a sharp truth as the fact that a human being can want to die and make it happen.
It had occurred in a neighboring continuum when Elmo was seven. The children were supposed to be told merely that Anna abLaura Stuart had died, but somehow the rest of the truth trickled down. Elmo got it from one of his older commune-sisters; the ground shivered and the day went blank. His commune-mother Sylvia had been first to sense his shock and trouble, to learn the cause and to aid him. “Anna bore a mue, Elmo. Yes, many women do and it’s always a grief, but see, Anna was a person who had wanted and wanted to bear a child. Then, that. Women sometimes do want it, well, too much for reason. I felt that way myself, Elmo, but then I was lucky, I had your corn-brothers Leo and Jon, and then I had the sterilization the way most of us do after two, and didn’t mind. Anna was—not that lucky, dear. She wasn’t interested enough in other things, I suppose she just stopped caring about staying alive. It doesn’t happen nowadays except once in many thousand lives, Elmo. It wouldn’t happen as it did to Anna more than once in a million, I suppose, because the way we’ve learned how to five now: every woman in the family can be a mother to every kid, and so if she can’t bear her own it’s not too bad. But it did happen to Anna. Think of what she did as the result of a sickness. It’s a sickness that love can usually prevent. But first love has to understand, and I guess no one understood Anna quite well enough.”
It helped. The full story, hesitation cuts and all, belonged to later years. Sylvia always helped, as much by mood and manner as by her careful words; yet the shadow overtook Elmo now and then for some while afterward, in spite of her, darkening him at unforeseeable times, the shadow of the truth that sometimes a human being can want to die. Or, perhaps worse, just not want to live. Involuntarily he sighed. Andrei inquired: “Trouble?”
“Wrote a simile. Got to delete. Sighed in sympathy for the pain Mahew would feel at spectacle of freshman writing a—no I didn’t either, I just—” he looked out the window, feeling Andrei’s regard.
Andrei said only: “Road to Parnassus is paved with the polished skulls of pretty similes that rightly died in infancy.”
“Ai-yi, poor little fellas!”
“Misplaced sympathy. Virtuous ones survive—in Nora’s poems for instance. By the way, why not leave the little bastard in, just for thrills? Mahew might go splat, but he wouldn’t downgrade your paper for it, not unless he’s changed since last year when I was a jagged sophomore thorn in his meat.”
“Why, Zenas, thou hast spoken, and the child shall live.”
“Back to work, Hunnington.”
The war was resumed officially in 4939, and after some piddling about, was brought to full concert pitch within a year, involving most of the nations of the earth and culminating in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities of the already defeated nation of Japan, by the first and quite successful use of atomic bombs. The success, in fact, seems to have proved embarrassing, for atomic weapons were not used again except for “testing” (i.e., trials to see how many of them could be jacked off without rendering the planet entirely uninhabitable) until near the close of the century. Minor (non-atomic) phases of the century’s war were faithfully pursued, however, in Korea and other localities, especially in the once theoretically independent nadon of Vietnam.
This territory was set apart by the United States and a few lesser powers as a proving ground for military hardwa
re and defoliants, although survivors among the inhabitants are said to have protested this procedure as a less than friendly act: and eventually public opinion, having still a few obsolescent means of expression, brought about die withdrawal of armed forces, and even chemical experts, from the ruined waste, greatly to the annoyance of the governing military minds, for it was believed that some excellent bomb-targets yet remained.
The war then advanced with minor rumblings and distractions into the last decade of the century and concluded with what has been variously called the Atomic War, the Accidental Incident, and the Twenty-Minute War. Since few documents and no historical analyses survive, speculation must here be called upon to bridge what history presents to us as a sullen void.
“Hoy, Andrei, come looka how my fat prose goes gibboning along! Elephant in a parade.”
“You’ve seen elephants, Far-wanderer?”
“Uhha, at Table Mountain. Circus. Like walking barns. You keep imagining they have a sense of humor.”
“Hope to see those faraway places one day.” Andrei came to lean over and cross his arms under Elmo’s chin, and to read.
“There are short cruises, Mentor,” said Elmo. “Vana—Trindad—even Valpo through the Straits of Panama. I’d admire to see the Shade Gardens of Valpo. They say people on holiday can loaf around naked all day long in the half-sun—make love—chess, music, swimming in the pools. But it would be good anywhere with you.”
“Ai?—let’s think about such a cruise.”
“We could take off in July and be back in September. Vana anyhow, maybe not the Valpo trip.”
“The two of us only?”
“I’d like that best, Eudaimon.”
“Agreed. . . . Really stuck for ten bucks?”
“Oh—hell’s buttons—spent most of my allowance on that tunic. A stupid vanity, and now I’m short of what I need to get that Chaucer for Nora’s birthday.”
“Tunic looks good on you, but yes, it wasn’t smart.”
“Hate to write home for it. Could tell ’em to take it out of next quarter’s. Feel kid-stupid.”