Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  It was warm inside, warm and dark. Light entered from the passage to the dining room, but it wasn’t enough to blot out the stars through the lattice of triangular panes overhead. It was almost like being out in the open.

  Pink quickly pointed out the positional etiquette within the dome. It wasn’t hard to follow, but I still tended to keep my arms and legs pulled in close so I wouldn’t trip someone by sprawling into a walk space.

  My misconceptions got me again. There was no sound but the soft whisper of flesh against flesh, so I thought I was in the middle of an orgy. I had been at them before, in other communes, and they looked pretty much like this. I quickly saw that I was wrong, and only later found out I had been right. In a sense.

  What threw my evaluations out of whack was the simple fact that group conversation among these people had to look like an orgy. The much subtler observation that I made later was that with a hundred naked bodies sliding, rubbing, kissing, caressing, all at the same time, what was the point in making a distinction? There was no distinction.

  I have to say that I use the noun “orgy” only to get across a general idea of many people in close contact. I don’t like the word, it is too ripe with connotations. But I had these connotations myself at the time, so I was relieved to see that it was not an orgy. The ones I had been to had been tedious and impersonal, and I had hoped for better from these people.

  Many wormed their way through the crush to get to me and meet me. Never more than one at a time; they were constantly aware of what was going on and were waiting their turn to talk to me. Naturally, I didn’t know it then. Pink sat with me to interpret the hard thoughts. I eventually used her words less and less, getting into the spirit of tactile seeing and understanding. No one felt they really knew me until they had touched every part of my body, so there were hands on me all the time. I timidly did the same.

  What with all the touching, I quickly got an erection, which embarrassed me quite a bit. I was berating myself for being unable to keep sexual responses out of it, for not being able to operate on the same intellectual plane I thought they were on, when I realized with some shock that the couple next to me was making love. They had been doing it for the last ten minutes, actually, and it had seemed such a natural part of what was happening that I had known it and not known it at the same time.

  No sooner had I realized it than I suddenly wondered if I was right. Were they ? It was very slow and the light was bad. But her legs were up, and he was on top of her, that much I was sure of. It was foolish of me, but I really had to know. I had to find out what the hell I was in. How could I give the proper social responses if I didn’t know the situation?

  I was very sensitive to polite behavior after my months at the various communes. I had become adept at saying prayers before supper in one place, chanting Hare Krishna at another, and going happily nudist at still another. It’s called “when in Rome,” and if you can’t adapt to it you shouldn’t go visiting. I would kneel to Mecca, burp after my meals, toast anything that was proposed, eat organic rice and compliment the cook; but to do it right, you have to know the customs. I had thought I knew them, but had changed my mind three times in as many minutes.

  They were making love, in the sense that he was penetrating her. They were also deeply involved with each other. Their hands fluttered like butterflies all over each other, filled with meanings I couldn’t see or feel. But they were being touched by and were touching many other people around them. They were talking to all these people, even if the message was as simple as a pat on the forehead or arm.

  Pink noticed where my attention was. She was sort of wound around me, without really doing anything I would have thought of as provocative. I just couldn’t decide. It seemed so innocent, and yet it wasn’t.

  “That’s (—) and (—),” she said, the parentheses indicating a series of hand motions against my palm. I never learned a sound word as a name for any of them but Pink, and I can’t reproduce the bodytalk names they had. Pink reached over, touched the woman with her foot, and did some complicated business with her toes. The woman smiled and grabbed Pink’s foot, her fingers moving.

  “(—) would like to talk with you later,” Pink told me. “Right after she’s through talking to (—). You met her earlier, remember? She says she likes your hands.”

  Now this is going to sound crazy, I know. It sounded pretty crazy to me when I thought of it. It dawned on me with a sort of revelation that her word for talk and mine were miles apart. Talk, to her, meant a complex interchange involving all parts of the body. She could read words or emotions in every twitch of my muscles, like a lie detector. Sound, to her, was only a minor part of communication. It was something she used to speak to outsiders. Pink talked with her whole being.

  I didn’t have the half of it, even then, but it was enough to turn my head entirely around in relation to these people. They talked with their bodies. It wasn’t all hands, as I’d thought. Any part of the body in contact with any other was communication, sometimes a very simple and basic sort think of McLuhan’s light bulb as the basic medium of information—perhaps saying no more than “I am here.” But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation. What I wanted to know was what were they saying ? I knew, even at that dim moment of realization, that it was much more than I could grasp. Sure, you’re saying. You know about talking to your lover with your body as you make love. That’s not such a new idea. Of course it isn’t, but think how wonderful that talk is even when you’re not primarily tactile-oriented. Can you carry the thought from there, or are you doomed to be an earthworm thinking about sunsets?

  While this was happening to me, there was a woman getting acquainted with my body. Her hands were on me, in my lap when I felt myself ejaculating. It was a big surprise to me, but to no one else. I had been telling everyone around me for many minutes, through signs they could feel with their hands, that it was going to happen. Instantly, hands were all over my body. I could almost understand them as they spelled tender thoughts to me. I got the gist, anyway, if not the words. I was terribly embarrassed for only a moment, then it passed away in the face of the easy acceptance. It was very intense. For a long time I couldn’t get my breath.

  The woman who had been the cause of it touched my lips with her fingers. She moved them slowly, but meaningfully I was sure. Then she melted back into the group.

  “What did she say?” I asked Pink.

  She smiled at me. “You know, of course. If you’d only cut loose from your verbalizing. But, generally, she meant ‘How nice for you.’ It also translates as ‘How nice for me.’ And ‘me,’ in this sense, means all of us. The organism.”

  I knew I had to stay and learn to speak.

  * * * *

  The commune had its ups and downs. They had expected them, in general, but had not known what shape they might take.

  Winter killed many of their fruit trees. They replaced them with hybrid strains. They lost more fertilizer and soil in windstorms because the clover had not had time to anchor it down. Their schedule had been thrown off by the court actions, and they didn’t really get things settled in a groove for more than a year.

  Their fish all died. They used the bodies for fertilizer and looked into what might have gone wrong. They were using a three-stage ecology of the type pioneered by the New Alchemists in the seventies. It consisted of three domed ponds: one containing fish, another with crushed shells and bacteria in one section and algae in another, and a third full of daphnids. The water containing fish waste from the first pond was pumped through the shells and bacteria, which detoxified it and converted the ammonia it contained into fertilizer for the algae. The algae water was pumped into the second pond to feed the daphnids. Then daphnids and algae were pumped to the fish pond as food and the enriched water was used to fertilize greenhouse plants in all of the domes.

  They tested the water and the soil and found t
hat chemicals were being leached from impurities in the shells and concentrated down the food chain. After a thorough cleanup, they restarted and all went well. But they had lost their first cash crop.

  They never went hungry. Nor were they cold; there was plenty of sunlight year-round to power the pumps and the food cycle and to heat their living quarters. They had built their buildings half-buried with an eye to the heating and cooling powers of convective currents. But they had to spend some of their capital. The first year they showed a loss.

  One of their buildings caught fire during the first winter. Two men and a small girl were killed when a sprinkler system malfunctioned. This was a shock to them. They had thought things would operate as advertised. None of them knew much about the building trades, about estimates as opposed to realities. They found that several of their installations were not up to specifications, and instituted a program of periodic checks on everything. They learned to strip down and repair anything on the farm. If something contained electronics too complex for them to cope with, they tore it out and installed something simpler.

  Socially, their progress had been much more encouraging. Janet had wisely decided that there would be only two hard and fast objectives in the realm of their relationships. The first was that she refused to be their president, chairwoman, chief, or supreme commander. She had seen from the start that a driving personality was needed to get the planning done and the land bought and a sense of purpose fostered from their formless desire for an alternative. But once at the promised land, she abdicated. From that point they would operate as a democratic communism. If that failed, they would adopt a new approach. Anything but a dictatorship with her at the head. She wanted no part of that.

  The second principle was to accept nothing. There had never been a deaf-blind community operating on its own. They had no expectations to satisfy, they did not need to live as the sighted did. They were alone. There was no one to tell them not to do something simply because it was not done.

  They had no clearer idea of what their society would be than anyone else. They had been forced into a mold that was not relevant to their needs, but beyond that they didn’t know. They would search out the behavior that made sense, the moral things for deaf-blind people to do. They understood the basic principles of morals: that nothing is moral always, and anything is moral under the right circumstances. It all had to do with social context. They were starting from a blank slate, with no models to follow.

  By the end of the second year they had their context. They continually modified it, but the basic pattern was set. They knew themselves and what they were as they had never been able to do at the school. They defined themselves in their own terms.

  * * * *

  I spent my first day at Keller in school. It was the obvious and necessary step. I had to learn handtalk.

  Pink was kind and very patient. I learned the basic alphabet and practiced hard at it. By the afternoon she was refusing to talk to me, forcing me to speak with my hands. She would speak only when pressed hard, and eventually not at all. I scarcely spoke a single word after the third day.

  This is not to say that I was suddenly fluent. Not at all. At the end of the first day I knew the alphabet and could laboriously make myself understood. I was not so good at reading words spelled into my own palm. For a long time I had to look at the hand to see what was spelled. But like any language, eventually you think in it. I speak fluent French, and I can recall my amazement when I finally reached the point where I wasn’t translating my thoughts before I spoke. I reached it at Keller in about two weeks.

  I remember one of the last things I asked Pink in speech. It was something that was worrying me.

  “Pink, am I welcome here?”

  “You’ve been here three days. Do you feel rejected?”

  “No, it’s not that. I guess I just need to hear your policy about outsiders. How long am I welcome?”

  She wrinkled her brow. It was evidently a new question.

  “Well, practically speaking, until a majority of us decide we want you to go. But that’s never happened. No one’s stayed here much longer than a few days. We’ve never had to evolve a policy about what to do, for instance, if someone who sees and hears wants to join us. No one has, so far, but I guess it could happen. My guess is that they wouldn’t accept it. They’re very independent and jealous of their freedom, though you might not have noticed it. I don’t think you could ever be one of them. But as long as you’re willing to think of yourself as a guest, you could probably stay for twenty years.”

  “You said ‘they.’ Don’t you include yourself in the group?”

  For the first time she looked a little uneasy. I wish I had been better at reading body language at the time. I think my hands could have told me volumes about what she was thinking.

  “Sure,” she said. “The children are part of the group. We like it. I sure wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, from what I know of the outside.”

  “I don’t blame you.” There were things left unsaid here, but I didn’t know enough to ask the right questions. “But it’s never a problem, being able to see when none of your parents can? They don’t… resent you in any way?”

  This time she laughed. “Oh, no. Never that. They’re much too independent for that. You’ve seen it. They don’t need us for anything they can’t do themselves. We’re part of the family. We do exactly the same things they do. And it really doesn’t matter. Sight, I mean. Hearing, either. Just look around you. Do I have any special advantages because I can see where I’m going?”

  I had to admit that she didn’t. But there was still the hint of something she wasn’t saying to me.

  “I know what’s bothering you. About staying here.” She had to draw me back to my original question; I had been wandering.

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t feel a part of the daily life. You’re not doing your share of the chores. You’re very conscientious and you want to do your part. I can tell.”

  She read me right, as usual, and I admitted it.

  “And you won’t be able to until you can talk to everybody. So let’s get back to your lessons. Your fingers are still very sloppy.”

  * * * *

  There was a lot of work to be done. The first thing I had to learn was to slow down. They were slow and methodical workers, made few mistakes, and didn’t care if a job took all day so long as it was done well. When I was working by myself I didn’t have to worry about it: sweeping, picking apples, weeding in the gardens. But when I was on a job that required teamwork I had to learn a whole new pace. Eyesight enables a person to do many aspects of a job at once with a few quick glances. A blind person will take each aspect of the job in turn if the job is spread out. Everything has to be verified by touch. At a bench job, though, they could be much faster than I. They could make me feel as though I was working with my toes instead of fingers.

  I never suggested that I could make anything quicker by virtue of my sight or hearing. They quite rightly would have told me to mind my own business. Accepting sighted help was the first step to dependence, and after all, they would still be here with the same jobs to do after I was gone.

  And that got me to thinking about the children again. I began to be positive that there was an undercurrent of resentment, maybe unconscious, between the parents and children. It was obvious that there was a great deal of love between them, but how could the children fail to resent the rejection of their talent? So my reasoning went, anyway.

  I quickly fit myself into the routine. I was treated no better or worse than anyone else, which gratified me. Though I would never become part of the group, even if I should desire it, there was absolutely no indication that I was anything but a full member. That’s just how they treated guests: as they would one of their own number.

  Life was fulfilling out there in a way it has never been in the cities. It wasn’t unique to Keller, this pastoral peace, but the people there had it in generous helpings. The eart
h beneath your bare feet is something you can never feel in a city park.

  Daily life was busy and satisfying. There were chickens and hogs to feed, bees and sheep to care for, fish to harvest, and cows to milk. Everybody worked: men, women, and children. It all seemed to fit together without any apparent effort. Everybody seemed to know what to do when it needed doing. You could think of it as a well-oiled machine, but I never liked that metaphor, especially for people. I thought of it as an organism. Any social group is, but this one worked. Most of the other communes I’d visited had glaring flaws. Things would not get done because everyone was too stoned or couldn’t be bothered or didn’t see the necessity of doing it in the first place. That sort of ignorance leads to typhus and soil erosion and people freezing to death and invasions of social workers who take your children away. I’d seen it happen.

  Not here. They had a good picture of the world as it is, not the rosy misconceptions so many other Utopians labor under. They did the jobs that needed doing.

  I could never detail all the nuts and bolts (there’s that machine metaphor again) of how the place worked. The fish-cycle ponds alone were complicated enough to overawe me. I killed a spider in one of the greenhouses, then found out it had been put there to eat a specific set of plant predators. Same for the frogs. There were insects in the water to kill other insects; it got to a point where I was afraid to swat a mayfly without prior okay.

  As the days went by I was told some of the history of the place. Mistakes had been made, though surprisingly few.

  One had been in the area of defense. They had made no provision, for it at first, not knowing much about the brutality and random violence that reaches even to the out-of-the-way corners. Guns were the logical and preferred choice out here, but were beyond their capabilities.

  One night a carload of men who had had too much to drink showed up. They had heard of the place in town. They stayed for two days, cutting the phone lines and raping many of the women.