by John Barnes
She didn't answer, but she seemed to withdraw into herself a little. My fault, love should not be interrupted. I drew her up toward me and began to caress her, whispering gently, almost baby-talk. Margaret was an adult, and not particularly frightened, but it was the first time, at least between us, and I could tell she was much more excited and anxious than I was, so the comforting and the tenderness were going to be up to me.
I found that I was enjoying it a great deal. Her breasts were small and flaccid, her thighs thick, her hips wide, her buttocks flat, noticeably so even in the dark, but they were hers, and that mattered more to me than I would have thought. By the time I mounted her I think I must have been as excited as she was.
At least Garsenda had not taught her to behave like an Occitan in every way. Margaret didn't thrash, scream, or make a display of being carried away by desire, or shout anything poetic (I had always found that distracting anyway). The frantic sincerity of her response could not have been faked; it was much more exciting than anything artistic the average donzelha might have done.
So it was probably only nine hours of sleep, but it was still wonderful, and when we got up the next morning I felt utterly, irrationally happy. And I wouldn't have missed Margaret's smile for anything.
FOUR
The best thing about what happened next was that for tens of days nothing especially unusual happened. Bieris and Bruce moved back out to Sodom Basin, now that they apparently could count on safe passage. According to Aimeric's report to Shan, almost half of one percent of Caledony's money supply had disappeared through the Bazaar in forty-eight hours, and by the end of the third day there were officially some unemployed people, though so far there was insurance to take care of them. About half the people staying in the Center, the half who had places of their own or were not banned from their families, moved back home, but most of our core group stayed around; with a little stretching and arranging, Margaret and Paul had rooms of their own, and Thorwald got his apartment back.
Margaret slept in my room most nights, and got into the habit, whenever we were together, of leaning against me or resting a hand or arm on me somewhere. I was surprised to find how much I liked that.
Betsy and Valerie got so proficient at sharing Valerie's body that people began to just address them as two people. Betsy, of course, had never attracted male attention, and Valerie had never been able to get enough of it, so they set about driving the male population of the place crazy. There was a brief and evident pass at me once when Margaret was off on an errand, and I was deeply astonished to find that I not only didn't have any trouble resisting it, I was in fact rather irritated by the whole thing.
I also discovered something else that Valerie and Betsy shared. They both sulked when they were disappointed. One more reason not to be involved.
One of Valerie's roommates told me later that the oddest thing was that you could sometimes hear Valerie's voice, talking in her sleep, carrying on a spat between the two of them; whatever their private differences, Betsy and Valerie were certainly a united front out in public.
Classes resumed, and I found out just how much of the unreceptivity of students had been due to the watchful eyes of the peeps, for although the PPP was now in charge of everything, it was widely known that most of the bugs had been pulled (and more were being pulled as Paul and Margaret tracked them down), and in any case every one of the students was ripe for jail and reeducation, and thus it no longer mattered whether they put their normality on display. It wasn't exactly an explosion of creativity—people were still very much just finding their feet—but there was a lively interest in things and a willingness to argue and test that had not been there before.
Of course those days were really just a brief calm before more storm could break out, but even so, I appreciated it. Aside from the opportunity to collect my energies, and to settle into the new order of my life, it was also a time for a gathering of forces.
Inessentialism, as Thorwald and Paul had framed it in that manifesto, was a perfectly wonderful idea if you were a Caledon, and painfully self-evident for an Occitan. The central tenet was that art should be inessential, that art consisted in doing all the things besides bodily functions and working that could give pleasure, and thus by definition art was an attack on pure functionalism ... but in the name of greater pleasure and higher rationality. The aintellects of the General Consultancy fought back and forth about that for a truly amazing amount of machine time, but with the help of Aimeric's father (who seemed faintly amused by the whole business) they had made an airtight case, and the Inessentialist Movement was registered as a legitimate, rational tendency within Caledon thought.
I don't suppose anyone thought that one of the major corollaries was going to matter quite so much as it turned out to; there was an argument implicit in Inessentialism that one ought to do a certain number of things on whim, just to experience them, particularly if no one else had ever experienced them. As Aimeric pointed out, if there had been Inessentialism when he was younger, he, Bruce, and Charlie would have had no problem getting permission to hike over Sodom Gap.
"Indeed, and quite a number of other good things might have come of it," old Carruthers said. We were all gathered in the Main Lounge, as we now always did in the last hour before bedtime; it was an occasion for campfire-style sing-alongs, or trading jokes and stories, or occasionally for political and religious arguments that I had a hard time following despite Margaret's best efforts to get them explained to me. This particular time no one had yet pulled out a musical instrument, and most people were just talking in little groups so far. I had gotten my preferred corner, and Margaret had slid onto the bench next to me, so that I could rest an arm on her shoulders while we talked.
Aimeric seemed astonished. "I thought you were opposed to our making the trip, and didn't like anything we were doing—"
The old Reverend grinned and sipped his beer. "Of course I was. I was a stiffnecked old swine at the time. Some of us take decades to acquire any youth, and some of us require a terrible shock."
Clarity Peterborough had recently gotten permission to come to the Center to visit on occasion, so she was there as well, sitting close to Aimeric and constantly glancing at him as if he were her bodyguard. "You're exaggerating the difference between then and now, also," she said. "Be honest, Luther. Much of the clash between you and Aimeric was just because you had two males in one household—"
"And no woman to mediate, yes, I know, I used to say that regularly," Carruthers admitted. "It was true too. You know, I've never thanked you for coming to visit so often in the first few years after Ambrose—sorry, but at the time you still were Ambrose—had left. I was dreadfully lonely, and your visits were very good for me."
Peterborough smiled, and somehow twenty or thirty stanyears vanished. "The pleasure really was all mine. Oh, I know a young apprentice minister is supposed to spend a lot of time with her mentor, but you know how rarely that's actually the case—most of them end up as unpaid personal servants. In the first place, you really did help me form my own vision of what I ought to be doing, and since I really was learning something, it was natural for me to stick around. And in the second place, it was my main way to get any news of Ambrose."
Aimeric sat up as if he'd unexpectedly gotten a splinter from the bench.
Old Carruthers grinned even more, and took an uncharacteristically long pull on his beer. "I always sort of suspected that might be the case."
Once again, Aimeric's relatively youthful appearance, due to suspended animation, a quarter century less exposure to ultraviolet, and perhaps most of all to having led a less embittering existence, had fooled me into thinking of him as younger than he was. He had to be almost the same age as the Reverend Peterborough. Just as I was making that connection, she said, "Oh, yes. A terrible crush on the local rebellious heretic ever since I was about twelve. Good girls who get scholarships and do all their homework and want to get everything right have a certain fatal interest in smart ba
d boys."
"I don't think I've ever seen Aimeric turn quite that color before," I said casually. Margaret stuck her elbow into my ribs.
Thorwald was tuning up with Valerie, and to my pleasant surprise they started to play some ballads from my Serras Verz group, doing some very nice duet work on them. We all turned to listen and appreciate.
As they finished the group, Thorwald gestured to me to join them. I was about to politely decline—I was enjoying their work too much, and having taught two music classes and played for the appreciation class that day my fingers were a bit sore and tired—when Valerie's face went briefly slack and then reshaped slightly, "D-do Oc-citans really do tha-at? Go on long walking trips out in the forest just because it's nice and it's pretty?"
"Yes, Betsy, they do," I said. "It's one of those things that's hard to explain the attraction of until you've actually done it—and then once you have done it, and do understand, you can't explain it to anyone else." I don't know whether my own songs had made me a bit homesick, or whether it was just the awareness that if I had stayed home I would probably be up in Terrbori to see the first wildflowers on the southern coast and fish for freezetrout in the roaring rivers right about then, or just a desire to hear myself talk, but I started describing a few adventures out in the boondocks, some of them trips I had made as long as twelve stanyears previously with my father. They seemed to enjoy the stories, so I kept going. Then Aimeric joined in and told about his trips with Charlie and Bruce, as well as more hiking trips. It killed most of the hour, and at the end of it I was really sorry that I hadn't just kept Valerie and Thorwald singing.
So often big things have small beginnings; the next evening, what everyone wanted to talk about was an idea that Paul had proposed as an "artistic experience." His idea was that since large passenger cats always carried a few bunks in case they were stranded overnight, that it might not be too much trouble to refit a couple of cats as rolling bunkhouses, and then to make an overland trip out to the "Pessimals," through one of several passes that could be identified from satellite maps, and finally down to the sea. The west coast was generally fairly sunny and warm, by local standards, which is to say it was like a chilly fall day on one of the islands off the polar continents on Wilson. The plan was to spend a day or two playing on the beach, perhaps hunting chickens or gathering crops gone wild, and then return through a different pass. Total trip time would be around twenty of the local twenty-eight-hour days, if we drove only in daylight.
I'd have thought that in the middle of a revolutionary situation, the idea of a camping trip wouldn't have mattered a bit, but Aimeric pointed out that plenty of revolutions had broken out over very minor questions. Within a day, they had drafted a plan and put it through to the scheduling bureaus, and received in exchange a list of over four hundred objections from the aintellects. They turned the list around within two of the local days by dividing it up among working groups, hitting the aintellects with a complete response. They also leafletted on the Bazaar grounds—something Shan allowed them to do—and thus turned the attempt to get permission for the expedition into a public squabble.
One media corporation owner, who had been a prominent elder in Peterborough's congregation, proposed to finance the whole thing by having the participants make sight-and-sound recordings of the trip, which would then be edited for consumption as a regular entertainment program. That gave the aintellects fits; they could see no rational reason for letting people buy irrational programming, and were as near as a machine can get to being dismayed when almost a million Utilitopian media subscribers flooded the system with requests for such a series of programs.
We hadn't even really tried to arrange for those million requests to happen, or at least not for exactly that to happen. It just grew out of the expedition permission application's being one of the major issues covered in our daily news leaflet, which had become unexpectedly popular. Every day, thousands of people went to the Bazaar to talk freely about their fury at the new regime, and went home bearing whispered stories of covered-up and censored peep excesses—and our leaflets, which were often recopied and scanned for transmission. Paper media were supposed to be insignificant—the city of Utilitopia had given up keeping track of them centuries before, because circulation was so small, but according to one report that Paul and Aimeric were able to extract in a data raid, the third most-used news source in Utilitopia was the leaflets that originated on our printer. Apparently anyone who was angry enough wanted to hear from us.
And the number of the angry was growing rapidly, with Caledony caught in a classic depression. In fewer than ten days, prices had dropped an average of thirty percent, putting one in every eight firms out of business and destroying jobs so rapidly that the unemployment insurance fund reputedly would be used up in less than a stanyear, after having accumulated for generations. All those shocked and angry people who with traditional Caledon stubbornness had opposed the coup not because they disagreed with Saltini's theology but because they did not see why rational persuasion alone would not have sufficed—and who saw the new order dawn with unprecedented economic disaster—were rapidly discovering that they had been secret liberals all along. Thorwald even got a friendly letter from his parents, and Margaret ended up having a long, warm conversation with her mother, who defied the injunction and commed her.
Thus, where ordinarily most Caledons would have regarded a petition for permission to rent equipment for a camping trip—or to record and produce media programming about it—as absolutely irrational and of no interest to them, the fact that Saltini was saying no to a potentially profit-making enterprise that apparently harmed no one made it all into a grand cause. It wasn't safe to attack doctrine and say that the necessities of life could be produced so cheaply that people should simply receive them free while the Connect Depression lasted, or to attack Saltini's policies and argue that if there wasn't enough work for people then unemployment should be shifted onto robots even at a further cost in lost efficiency, let alone to actually say that using people to do robot work was silly. Any voicing of such ideas, especially to a crowd in public, was good for a trip to jail, and although the PPP had had to release the first wave of political prisoners fairly quickly because they had flooded the prison system, after all it only took a few standays to grow more prisons, and now the peeps were able to lock up as many people as they wanted.
But to say that Inessentialism was a recognized school of thought, and that this particular Inessential activity would do no one any harm and would probably finance itself, and that therefore it was crazy of the regime to say no, was to oppose the regime on perfectly legal grounds, ones that could be defended to the hilt as rational.
So Saltini and the PPP kept objecting, and people kept lining up in our favor mostly because the regime objected, and as a not-surprising consequence, a million households were persuaded that they actually wanted to see the program. At that point the aintellects decided it was just one of those inexplicable pleasures that human beings insisted on indulging in, and reversed themselves, leaving Saltini little choice but to give in.
Thorwald ticked it off that night at the victory party, as we all took a break from singing so that everyone could get more to drink. "First of all, we've demonstrated a procedure that can force the Saltini regime to do things they don't want to do, and right now any situation in which they aren't completely in control is major progress. On top of that, we've established a major precedent for the General Consultancy to follow in the future, so that the law and tradition have been pulled a little more in our direction. And finally, we've established that it's possible to oppose the regime publicly and stay out of jail. At this point, I don't believe I actually care about going camping anymore; I'm already so happy that we've won so much—"
I was surprised when Paul said, "Well, I didn't care much originally—it was just a harassment issue—but now I really want to go on the trip, and I think even the people who just want to look over our shoulders do want us to
go now. I think we accidentally stumbled on something people really did want, even if they didn't know they wanted it."
"What did they want?" I asked.
"Well, do you realize most Utilitopians have never been out of Utilitopia, for example?" Paul leaned back against the bar. "And Utilitopia is not really a highly varied place— there's the hills and the valleys, the waterfront side and the mountain side, and that's about all. It doesn't really have 'neighborhoods' or 'districts' per se, the way that cities in Nou Occitan or St. Michael do. So they've either been in the same place all their lives, or gone to the little towns up and down the coast that look like broken-off chunks of Utilitopia, or maybe they've been over to Sodom, Babylon, Gomorrah, or Nineveh. That's it. Otherwise there has never been any variety of environment. For that matter, the trip out to Brace's place a few days ago was the first time in years I had gone beyond the city limits, and the very first time I had ever passed through Sodom Gap. I had a hard time believing that anything I saw was real!" He was beginning to gesture excitedly. "All right, now, I know people say I always talk like a calculating businessman, but do you see what this means? There's some kind of human need for visual or environmental variety, and if we can find a way to supply the need—"
"We could be richer than God," Thorwald said, trying hard to appear casual while blaspheming. He wasn't very good at it just yet.
Paul winced but grinned: "Yeah. Of course, there's this major problem that so many of the aintellects think that any pleasure they can't trace back to a full stomach, a good orgasm, or regular church attendance is highly suspect. But with the success we've had in persuading them that there are previously unconsidered forms of human pleasure, we may well be able to bring them around to it."
Margaret scratched her head. "Paul, I think you might be the most revolutionary of all of us. Doesn't that get very close to abolishing deciding which pleasures are rational, and which are not?"