Vision of Tarot

by Piers Anthony

  Now Paul had tangled with the Vice Squad before. The precepts of its formation and operation were anathema to him. He happened to be one of two student members of that Squad, part of the window dressing to make it seem like a Community guidance operation. He had been extremely awkward dressing. He had brought to the attention of the college president a private student-faculty liaison involving one of the faculty members of the Squad itself. "How can this Committee be expected to enforce social standards that it does not itself honor?" The encounter was all very polite on the surface, and the president made no specific commitments. But that member of the Squad had been expeditiously removed for reasons never quite clarified. It had not been the first time Paul had locked horns with the president. He had respect for the man and had learned how to prevail without causing unnecessary embarrassment. The president was tough but basically honorable: the ideal administrator. Still, the Squad no longer felt comfortable with Paul.

  Another time, the night watchman had caught a student couple in dishabille and in a compromising juxtaposition—but by morning had forgotten the name of the boy involved. The girl was known, but she refused to name her companion, and it was against faculty policy to punish girls for that might create a bad image in the eyes of the parents of prospective future female students. Thus the new law was applied selectively with discrimination practiced for the sake of image. The hypocrisy of this was evident to the students, if not to the faculty. Some girls were temperamentally innocent, but others were otherwise; to assume that the male was necessarily the instigator was at best naive.

  At any rate, the entire student body knew via the grapevine who this boy was, and possibly certain faculty members knew it too—but this information was not available to the Squad. The lines of battle were hardening. In a community that had once been united, ugly currents were manifesting. Like the historical war in Asia, an originally simple and possibly justifiable idea had been transformed into self-destructive force. Paul, when questioned by the Squad, repeated his philosophical aversion to its purpose. "I know who the boy is—but I shall not tell you." And he smiled, rather enjoying the situation. Perhaps, he thought in retrospect, that smile had been a mistake. The Committee was unable to act, and had to drop the matter, but—Next time the watchman caught a couple (coupling was a popular form of education), he took down both their names. There would be no slipping the noose this time! By sheer chance, the boy this time was Paul's friend Dick, and the couple had been using, with Paul's permission, Paul's own nocturnal hideaway: in the attic of the Community library, under the eaves. It was set up over the rafters with a mattress, tapped-wire electricity, and a bottle of 100-proof vodka (definitely not Old Grandma!), and was accessable by a rope ladder and trap door. It was perhaps the finest and most private love niche on campus. But Paul was not in it, that particular night, and so the turn of fortune had led to the discovery of his friend instead. Dick had been hauled before the Vice Squad and suspended from campus for one week.

  There, but for the grace of God... (Oh, that's just a figure of speech, Carolyn. It means—well, if you had a piece of candy, and you gave it to a friend, and she ate it and got sick, how would you feel?) Actually, he was simplifying the story considerably, saying in a few words what was passing in voluminous review through his head and editing the juicier details.

  Paul, necessarily silent about his own stake in this matter, did not take this lying down. There was a policy in the Community that the victims of theft be reimbursed for their losses from the Community Treasury. Paul introduced a motion in the Meeting that his suspended friend be similarly reimbursed for his travel expenses, owing to the illicit action of the Vice Squad. It was a prepostrous notion—but such was the sentiment of the aroused Community at this stage that the motion carried. The money was paid—and the implications were hardly lost upon either faction. The Vice Squad had suffered another black eye, even in its technical victory. But Paul, too, had been privately wounded. He had lost his hideaway and had a friend suffer in lieu of himself. The stakes were rising, and his brushes with disaster were narrowing his options.

  During this extended sequence, Paul was in the Community Center when the night watchman entered on his rounds. The watchman was a large, amiable, husky young man hardly older than the students involved. "Here is the man," Paul announced loudly to the room in general, "who performs his job—beyond the call of duty." It was an extremely pointed remark whose import was lost on no one present; only the most diligent search had enabled the watchman to locate the hidden couple, starting from a single footprint in the snow. Yet the watchman had only done his job, however excellently, and was doing his job now. He merely smiled in response to Paul's remark, as it were turning the other cheek, punched the time clock, and departed.

  Now it was Paul himself on trial—and the Vice Squad had quite a number of scores to settle. It would be simplistic to suggest that their handling of the case was merely a matter of revenge, yet this was a factor that could not be entirely discounted, for Paul had caused the Committee more embarrassment than had any other person. He symbolized to a certain extent, the opposition to the very legitimacy of the Squad.

  There was a preliminary hearing. As with the medieval Inquisition, these things had to be done according to form. Three of the students in the lounge had been females (fully clothed and in their right minds); since it was their lounge, they were left out of it. They would have been left out regardless, as had two prior girls. The first of the three boys said: "I don't agree with the lounge curfew or recognize the authority of this Committee—but since I can not afford the kind of trouble this Committee will make for me if I stand on my rights, I shall not do so. I apologize for breaking the rule, and I shall not break it again. " This was exactly what the Committee wanted to hear; he had capitulated and acknowledged its power. He was let off without punishment. He finished out the semester and did not return to the college next year. It was a script Paul was later to recognize in totalitarian regimes across the world—but it was not one he was prepared to follow, then or ever.

  The second student turned to Paul. "Do we go that route, or do we fight?" Paul knew the other wanted to fight—indeed, he was the one who had remarked on the anal propensities of Exec—but did not want to stand alone. "We fight," Paul declared. And together they let the Vice Squad have it, denouncing the Committee with a thoroughness possible only to bright college males.

  In due course they were summoned for the verdicts. The other student entered the room first, emerging with the news that he had been suspended for one week. Paul, more ornery and more careful, brought along a tape recorder. The reaction of the Vice Squad would have been surprising to those who did not know the people involved. The faculty members refused to utter their decision for the recorder. Paul refused to hear it without that protection. So he departed without verdict.

  The Community held a massive protest rally over the student's suspension, meeting after hours in the female lounge. Where else? When the night watchman came, some fifty names—well over half the student body— were delivered to him to report to his owners. It was a mark of honor to be on that list. But the Squad termed this a "Demonstration" and ignored it. They didn't want half the Community; they wanted Paul. Tactic and counter-tactic; this stage of the battle was a draw.

  The student body then had a formal meeting in a male lounge; the faculty, by pointed invitation, attended. It was polite but hostile; some very fine rhetoric was recorded, blasting the faculty position. To repeated questions of propriety, legality, and ethics, the college president stated flatly: "If the suspension is not honored, I will close the college." He was serious; he spoke in terms of power, not morality. And in the end the students, being more reasonable and vulnerable than he, backed down; they had lost the confrontation. The student left on his week's suspension (more correctly, he hid out for several days, awaiting the decision on Paul), and Paul finally worked out a compromise with the tape-shy Squad: they gave him a written sentence. This turned out
to be significant, for when the other student missed an important drama rehearsal owing to his suspension, arousing the ire of the drama coach, the Squad denied that it had actually suspended him for a full week. Paul's written statement gave the lie to that, and he called them on it in the next Community Meeting. Yet the Squad had won this engagement. The action had alienated the entire student body and made a mockery of Community government, but the will of the faculty had prevailed.

  In all this fracas the faculty had held firmly to the position maintained by the college president: the lounge curfew was legitimate and so were the suspensions. But privately there were faculty dissentions. A respectable minority had sympathy for the student position. In addition, the college was then in a more acute financial crisis than usual; not all the faculty members had been paid for the past month. They knew the college could close! In the face of these ethical and practical stresses during this upheaval, only one faculty member had the courage to speak out. He did so at the student protest meeting in the presence of the college president. In qualified language he supported certain aspects of the student position and denied that the president spoke for all the faculty; since the president had made this claim, Will came eloquently close to calling him a liar. Will Hamlin—Paul's counselor.

  "And that," Paul concluded as the airplane descended, "was Will Hamlin—the only one with the guts to speak his mind honestly, though it may have imperiled his tenure at the college. At the time, his act of courage was largely obscured by the complexities of the situation; others may not have cared or even noticed.

  Standing up for what's right is often a thankless task. But I never forgot. Perhaps the later hardening of my own dedication to principle was sparked by that example. In later years I received solicitations for financial support signed by one of the members of that Vice Squad; they were routine printed things, but that signature balked me, and I did not contribute. But this time I heard from Will—and I could not in conscience refuse him. Now he seems to be the only one I knew then, who remains at the college today, twenty years later."

  Twenty years later? Brother Paul heard himself say that and wondered—for he had graduated only ten years before. Now the other mystery returned: how had this child happened to ask about a man in Brother Paul's past? It was an unlikely coincidence—yet somehow it did not seem coincidental. Almost, he could remember—"

  "Daddy, my ears hurt!" Carolyn said.

  The immediate pre-empted the reflective. "It must be the pressure," he told her. "As the plane descends, the air—" But her little face was screwing up in unfeigned discomfort; it was no time for reasonable discussion. "Try to pop your ears," he said quickly. "Hold your nose and blow. Hard. Harder!"

  Finally it worked. Her face relaxed and she smudged away a tear. "I don't like that," she announced.

  He could not blame her. He had not felt any discomfort himself, but knew the pressure on the eardrums could be painful, especially to a child who could not understand it.

  Now the plane was dropping through the clouds—and there were the streets and buildings of Boston.

  Brother Paul knew he was no longer on Planet Tarot. Not in perception, at least; this had to be another Animation. But it was a strange one, following its own course regardless of his personal will. Will? Was that a pun? Was his true will to remember Will Hamlin?

  If this were merely another vision—how could he ever, after this, be certain of reality? He had been so sure he was out of the Animations! If he had no way of knowing, as it were, whether he was asleep or awake...

  And the child, Carolyn—was she a mere hallucination? The strange thing was that he was coming to remember her, a little—though he was unmarried and had no children. So how could he remember her? The manifestations of Animation might transform the world of his senses, but had not hitherto touched the world of his mind. His firm belief in the sanctity of his basic identity had sustained him throughout this extraordinary adventure; if his private dignity, his concept of self-worth deserted him or was otherwise compromised, he was lost. He did not want anything diddling with his mind!

  He concentrated, trying to break out of the Vision. Carolyn turned toward him, her eyes big and blue. "Daddy—are you all right?"

  Brother Paul lost his will. If he vacated this Vision—what would become of her? He suspected she had no reality apart from his imagination, but somehow he perceived her trapped in a scheme from which the protagonist was gone. Horrible thought! He had to see her safely home—or wherever. Then he could vacate. Obeying the rules of the game.

  The Boston airport was like any other—of the pre-exodus days. Only the city surrounding it seemed different, shrunken. Yet not like most present cities, for it had electric power, and the skyscrapers showed lights on the upper floors, signifying occupancy. Strange, strange!

  The ground rushed up. The wheels bumped. The plane braked, and finally taxied up to the terminal. "Well, we made it," Brother Paul murmured.

  They de-planed and found themselves in the main terminal. According to the tickets they had a couple hours to wait before boarding their next plane. "Can we eat at the airport, Daddy?" Carolyn asked hopefully.

  Brother Paul checked and discovered he had money in the form of sufficient cash; they could eat. The prices were too high, the food nutritionally inadequate, but the little girl was happy. She didn't care what she ate; she merely wanted to have eaten at an airport. Afterwards they walked around nearby Boston, Carolyn finding everything fascinating from glassy buildings to cellar grates. He liked this child; it was easy to share the spirit of her little enthusiasms. She had always been that way, hyperactive, inquisitive, excitable. Right from the time of her birth, he remembered—"

  Remembered what? She was a construct of the present, having no reality apart from this vision, with no past and no future. Wasn't she?

  Brother Paul shook his head, watching her trip blithely ahead, busy as a puppy on a fascinating trail. He felt guilty for breaking up the illusion. Why not remember—whatever he had been about to remember?

  At last they reported to the Air Non Entity terminal for the hop into the unexplored wilds of New England. After the huge jet liner, this little twenty-passenger propeller plane seemed like a toy. But it revved up as though driven by powerfully torqued rubber bands and zoomed up into the sky well enough. Every time it went through a cute little cloud it dipped, alarming Brother Paul and scaring Carolyn. It just didn't seem safe!

  "Daddy, tell me the story about the little grades that weren't there," Carolyn said brightly as her transient attention wandered from the dip-clouds. Anything that continued longer than five minutes lost its appeal for a child this age, it seemed.

  But the little grades: how had she known about that? He must have told her before, and now she was showing the other side of the coin of short attention: she liked to have familiar things repeated, always with the same details.

  Well, it was pointless to rivet their attention on the clouds zooming by so perilously close outside or to concentrate on the incipient queasiness of motion sickness. So he closed his eyes to the all-too-suggestive vomit bags tucked conveniently in the pouch of the seat-back ahead, and told (again?) about the nonexistent grades. Carolyn was already learning to detest grades, and she liked to hear about his more sophisticated objections to the System. Gradually he fell into the scene himself, reliving it, though the words he spoke to her were once again simplified for her comprehension.

  The college used no grades. That was one of its initial attractions: the freedom from the oppressive pressure of examinations, of number or letter scores, and from all their attendent evils. Paul had not liked competing scholastically in high school against those who cheated; this had soured the whole system for him. For though he did not cheat, his position in his class was affected by those who were less scrupulous. Thus he had graduated below those whom he knew he had outperformed. Furthermore, even with honest performance by participants, testing was imperfect, and he suffered thereby. He learned slowly but
well, and retained his knowledge longer than the average, sometimes improving on it after the tests were past. Others forgot the material as soon as the tests were done. Yet their grades reflected not what they retained or used, but what their tests showed. Here at the college there was no cheating, for there was nothing to cheat at no all night cramming sessions, no circulated advance copies of final exams, no punitive reductions of earned grades, and no pattern of cram-forget. A massive, systemic evil had been exorcised.

  Instead, at the end of each college term, reports were made by three individuals: the instructor, the student, and the student's faculty counselor. A non-letter, non-numeric evaluation was composed from these three opinions and filed in the student's record. And that was it.

  Or so it had been claimed in the college catalogue.

  Paul had believed it throughout his residence at the college: four years. Freed from that grade incubus, he had explored other aspects of education, such as folk singing, table tennis, and the frustrations and joys of association with the distaff sex. He had not, however, neglected the formal classes; in fact he had learned a great deal at them that served him well in subsequent years. But the classes had been merely part of his education, not the whole of it. He had never regretted this approach and had always appreciated the college's readiness to allow him to find himself in his own fashion. A student could not really grow in the strait jacket of "normal" education, but here it was different. He learned what it pleased him to learn, in and out of classes, and had continued the habit since. Learning was still his major joy, now more than ever—because he had learned at this college not facts, but how to learn. All the other tribulations faded in importance, but this ability grew.