Institutions, so the sociologists tell us,
shape man’s course.
as the comings and goings of the hardshelled ants—their diligence since the
dawn of philosophy has delighted the makers of fables and the pointers of morals—are
predetermined by instinct.
Institutional man,
like the termites and the social insects among the hymenoptera, must, we
are told, sacrifice individual diversity for diversity of caste. (Already in his bureaucratic form, with a diligence which would astonish any uncommitted naturalist, institutional man accumulates
in vaults and cabinets and files,—
paper,
the same paper the polistes wasp builds his
house of
and the termites of the tropical uplands
their towering castles.)
Lecturing on “Social Insects” the late Professor Wheeler of Harvard used to point out with some malice to his students
that the ants,
too,
in spite of the predestined perfection
of their institutions,
suffered what he called “perversions
of appetite.”
Their underground galleries and storied
domes
are infested by an array of lethal creatures, thieves and predators, scavenger
crickets, greedy roaches and rove beetles, and one particular peculiarly plumed little bug
which secretes in its hairs an elixir so
delectable to antkind
that the ants lose all sense of self- or
species-preservation
and seek death in its embrace.
* * * *
III.
What man can contemplate the aardvark without astonishment?
Who, should he be happy enough to have the zoo attendant hand him the
little creature, can feel in his hands the odd ambiguous body,
between fur and feathers,
of the duckbilled platypus
without a catch of the breath and awful wonder (suppose you were me and I
were you): what impulses,
wakened by the intake of the soft fluvial eyes,
trigger the cells of that small brain.
Or the spiny anteater?
what dreams, when he curls in the dark of his box, luminesce inside the
wedgeshaped skull? The variousness of life
as if in whimsy
constantly cracks the dogmatic mold
which man the classifier laboriously constructs to ease the pain of sorting
out diversities.
In man himself there are more variants
than in the animal kingdom or the vegetable
or the crystalline realm of minerals; sometimes, when
man the classifier slackens under the endless drudgery of arguing away
complexities; man, the curious viewer; the other man, the naive,
the astonished child
looks at himself in a mirror or lets his fingers explore the dissymmetries of
his uneven carcass or maybe, taking a peep through a fiuoroscope,
discovers enough aberrant factors to outdo the bestiaries from aardvark to
zebra.
“Did you know,”
asked Dr. Roger J. Williams the biochemist from Texas, of a tableful of
punditry at a symposium at the Princeton Inn,
“that the size of the human stomach has a sixfold variation
or that the small intestines of men and women have measured out
anywhere between eleven feet and twenty-five feet nine?”
Eleven different patterns have been plotted for the muscle that controls the
index finger. The blood’s path through vessels and arteries flows in courses as various as the earth’s
great river systems. Cell chemistries and the matching
electrical impulses vary from individual to individual. We none of us smell
alike. (That’s how the bloodhound earns his kennel ration; the bloodhound can tell.)
And when you try to chart the convolutions of the brain, each one’s a
universe where the layered cells multiply a trillion interactions into infinity.
“Can it be?”
Egghead inquires of Doubledome,
“that variety instead of uniformity
is nature’s law?”
SENDOFF
Musing midnight and the century’s decline
man walks with dog,
shuffling the roadside gravel where sometimes we used to find among the
quartzy riverpebbles,
spent arrowheads of the Powhatans.
Overcast blots the stars. Not even a glimpse of impudent Echo, America’s toy
balloon the radio man said go out and see. The fall’s too late for lightningbugs, only a chill hint here and there of a glowworm in the wet grass.
The dog trots eager, sniffing the night, proud of her man’s steps behind. The
man,
shamed drags beaten strides, drained of every thought but hatred
of the tinpot pharaohs whose coarse imprecations the impartial transistors
have been dinning in his ears. Evil is indivisible. By hate they rose to flashbulb glory and the roar of cowed multitudes, police sirens shrieking how great the leader, how little the led: the abject mike ever waiting to receive
the foul discharge of their power to kill. The lie squared, the lie cubed, the lie
to the power of x deals death like a tornado. By hate they live. By hate we’ll see them die. We’ve seen them die before. The hate remains
to choke out good, to strangle the still small private voice that is God’s spark,
in man. Man drowns in his own scum.
These nights are dark.
In the light of the carriagelamps on the brick steps of the sleeping house
back home the man pauses for a last breath of the outdoor air; the dog’s nose nuzzles his hand. She bows, wriggles, cavorts, goes belly up, eyes rolling in frantic appreciation:
walker on hindlegs, hurler of sticks, foodgiver, builder of shelter, toolmaker,
creation’s lord, initiator, master of Yes and No;
wagging dog-Shakespeare her tail declaims:
Oh paragon of animals.
<
* * * *
IT BECOMES NECESSARY
by Ward Moore
It was just about twenty-five years ago, as a high school student, during the period of hope between the Great Depression and the pre-war “recession,” that I first read Dos Passos’ U.S.A.
That was the day of the WPA, PWA, CCC, and NYA. In my school in the Bronx, a dollar was enough for an evening’s date; none of my friends owned a car; the burning question among Young Intellectuals was whether to take the Ludlow Oath (never to fight in a war) or to support Collective Security (economic sanctions against fascist and militarist nations). Compulsory military service in peacetime was a practice of undemocratic foreign governments. We worried about civil rights; we were proud that this country held no political prisoners.
The prevailing intellectual tone was agnostic: religious instruction in the public schools was as unthinkable as sex education was unobtainable. The only really strong opposition to Communism here was from the extreme right wing— and the Trotskyites. The failure of the League of Nations had undermined any hope for world government.
In the quarter century since then, we have been acutely conscious of the changes in our physical existence. Synthetic fabrics, antibiotics, the home freezer, television, transistors, fm radio, cloud seeding, DDT, jet planes, radar, atomic reactors—all these were unknown, and almost undreamed, twenty-five years ago.
But the social and political changes—good and bad both —and both greater than all the changes In the first hundred and fifty years of American history—have crept in on us, almost unawares ...
* *
* *
She sat there thinking. These chairs were never designed for living women, only mannikins. You had to be wax or plastic or whatever they made them out of, with Brancusi heads for pillared hats (the cult of Nefertiti, like that of the Druids, domesticated for Macy’s and Gimbels) and lower extremities in the best tradition of Albert the Good. Ten years younger, and she could do a nice paper for Sociology 2—or would it be European History 4?—on the Victorianism of the French, or, Why Was Louis Napoleon Little? Whatever happened to feminism? Her feet ached.
Hot water. Surely there was nothing unreasonable about hot water. Fifty thousand bathtubs in lower Manhattan, five million in New York (Oh God, why did I ever start on this, with my head for statistics?) . . . Even in England, with the stoic revulsion against comfort, it wasn’t too hard to get. Only here in France, in mobilized, dedicated, redeemed, righteous France, with everyone sacrificing to the point of ecstasy, was there suspicion attached to such use of patriotic resources.
She sipped the beer which she found completely revolting. I have no business here, she told herself for the fiftieth time, no business whatever. I could be asleep in that kennel they call a hotel, or could have gotten decently drunk, or thrown myself in the Seine (Paris is worth a Mass—but not to me) instead of torturing myself with this filthy chair and this filthy drink in this filthy café in this filthy city. Oh heavens...
He slid into the seat opposite so quickly that he was there, established, before she was aware of him. He was big, with a crooked nose and light eyes and freckled, hairy hands which he placed on the table like an offering. “Mrs. Fieldman?”
I don’t have to answer, she assured herself, I really don’t have to answer. I didn’t agree to any meeting. I’ve promised nothing; I’m not committed even to acknowledge my name. I can jump up and say, Sir! or just look haughty, or walk away. But of course I’ve been so conditioned against making a scene (Concord and Lexington were in bad taste, the fall of the Bastille would have shocked Emily Post and we don’t even think of the storming of the Winter Palace), I’m not going to do anything except sit here and listen to this fat man—he isn’t really fat; I’ve just been out of the country so long that anyone who eats steak regularly looks fat—and hear him patiently through. Hate him? Naturally I hate him. He’s one of them, isn’t he?
“Mrs. Fieldman— Do you want to see my credentials, by the way?”
“No.”
“That’s good. Because I could hardly carry them in enemy territory, could I?”
“France isn’t enemy territory,” she said more pedantically than she meant because she hadn’t intended to talk to him in anything but monosyllables. “It’s only one of the policing nations which—”
“ ‘Policing nations.’” He didn’t raise his voice; he expressed his disgust softly, with a soft sneer, a soft contempt. ‘The U.S. isn’t a two-bit country to be policed. If there’s policing to be done, we do it. Policing nations, Third Force! Who do they think they are?”
She shrugged her shoulders. Answering rhetorical questions only got you started on a treadmill.
He made an observable effort to be soothing, earnest, confident, winning. “Mrs. Fieldman, you have an opportunity—”
“Oh God,” she said, “the opportunities I’ve had. When I consider my moderation, I’m amazed at my opportunities. This time no doubt it’s to serve my country.”
She thought his pale eyes wavered just a little. “Well, it is your country.”
“Is it? I understood, or read in the paper, or something, that my citizenship was voided.”
He regarded her through partly closed lids. How silly, she thought; like a parlor hypnotist or something: the hard look. Really, they picked the stupidest men for agents. It’s a pattern, I guess. William S. Hart, the frontier marshal, steel-eyed character. “That disability can be removed.”
“What’s done can be undone?”
“Sure. Sometimes. Especially in the case of native-born.”
“The March on Washington can be reversed, the Defenders of the Constitution can bow out, Regulations can be replaced by laws again, the disfranchised minorities can be reinfranchised, the dead restored to life?”
He leaned back in the chair, obviously never meant to accommodate a man of his weight. “Little lady,” he said easily, “why do you bother your pretty head about crap like that? Sure, they lynched a few coloreds and booted out a few Jews, but what’s that between you and me?”
You just can’t ever tell, she thought; I’d have sworn (an archaic expression) he was the type to say between you and I. You never know, do you? ‘This”: she began, hoping she was speaking judicially, implacably, with a haughty calm which should make him quail, yet feeling pretty sure she was only sounding feminine and hysterical, “is the destruction of a democratic system which may not have worked too well but which was infinitely better (in kind, not just in degree) than the totalitarianism you replaced it with. Monstrousness, brutality, beastliness, the killing or exiling of those who couldn’t be numbed or corrupted, moral and political bankruptcy— Oh, hell, I can’t talk about it without bleating like an orator...”
“We all make mistakes,” he said soothingly. “You have to admit the Defenders have done a lot of good.”
“Do I? The compulsion doesn’t seem inescapable. Or have you a car around the corner that will draw up in a minute to convince me?”
“Now, we don’t do things like that. You’ve been reading those sensational limey papers.”
“They are annoying, aren’t they?” she taunted him, suddenly unafraid. ‘Too bad you can’t suppress them or take them over the way you did the Times and the Post-Dispatch and all the rest.”
“If you love the English so much, why did you leave London? What are you doing in France?”
She had an impulse to stick out her tongue and say, Yah, don’t you wish you knew? Try and find out. Or to speak of the conflict inside her and the depression of spirit which had sent her across the Channel. Instead she murmured, “England and France are allies. Along with the rest of the world, except the United States and the Soviet Union.”
“Yeh, sure.” For the first time he showed impatience. ‘The Third Force and all the rest of it.”
“Garçon,” she called, “une boc encore, s’il vous plait.”
“How can you drink that swill?” he asked, not scornfully but curiously. “Why don’t you let me buy you an honest drink?”
“Pepsicola?”
“If you like. Or a real martini or some of this Norman applejack.”
“Shall we consider the amenities taken care of? And come down to business?”
“Sure, sure. Here it is, right on the line: restoration of citizenship (after all, it isn’t as though you were a Jew yourself), full compensation for any property confiscated or bought at less than market value, guaranteed protection, freedom to travel in or out of the country and fifty thousand bucks in cash.”
“And my ... my husband?”
The prescriptive sympathy on his face made him resemble a beagle who has lost the scent. “Look, I can’t do miracles; nobody can bring back the dead. Like I said, we all make mistakes, don’t we? But hell—excuse me—a good looking girl like you can get all the husbands she wants. Genuine American ones. Especially with fifty grand, along with the body. And, oh yes, we’ll throw in a good job too—maybe nine, ten thousand a year.”
“What am I supposed to do for all this? Shoot a few well-chosen statesmen?”
He leaned back again, making the chair creak. “Kid, you’ve got nothing but blood on your mind. I’ve told you we’re not doing things that way. We don’t want violence. No violence at all. We just want to be left alone. Peaceful coexistence. If the Third Force wants to police the Russians, let them go ahead. We don’t mind. But just leave us alone, see?”
“And if they won’t leave you alone?”
“We’ll fight.” The face which had been uncommitted, fixed in an expression of reasoning and persuasion, became truculent, pote
ntially menacing. Like a policeman or Defender who wears a mask of good nature. He was undoubtedly both.
“What would you fight with?”
“Oh, we’ve got a couple of shots in our locker yet. Maybe the war did hit us pretty hard, but even after you write off Pittsburgh and Gary and Birmingham—”
“And New York, San Francisco, Chicago.”
“Sure, sure. But we won, didn’t we? We can still get a lot of planes in the air and mobilize an army—which is more than the Russkis can. And we hardly lost a sub. And we know your Third Force is too chicken to drop C-bombs on us—”
“Not my Third Force.”
“See?” All menace had been tucked back behind the folds and lines of his face. “I knew you were a good American deep down. Just a little misunderstanding.”
“That’s right,” she replied, thinking of Sol and refusing to think of Sol.
“Pardon, m’sieu, ‘dame.”
Two men had paused by their table in a delicate balance between part of the sidewalk used exclusively by pedestrians and that occupied by the café. The older, paunched, wattled, bald, with a William Howard Taft mustache, was trying to pull the younger away. Except for heavy, decayed teeth, the young man had the face of one of Pope Gregory’s angels: blond, blue-eyed, straight-nosed, pink-cheeked. His lips were red and full, but firm.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology] Page 18