A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories (5 page)

“Mo seems to get under John Kelly’s hide,” Ike said as they went down A Corridor to the elevators.

“Oh,
shit,
Daddy,” Esther said.

At sixteen, Esther had got a little more height, though she still hunched over as if her head was pulled forward by her effort
to see through the thick glasses that kept sliding down her nose. Her temper was pretty moody. Ike couldn’t seem to say much
lately without her jumping him.

“ ‘Shit’ isn’t a statement that furthers discussion, Esther,” he said mildly.

“What discussion?”

“The topic, as I understood it, was John Kelly’s impatience with Mo, and what might motivate it.”

“Oh,
shit,
Daddy!”

“Stop it, Esther,” Susan said.

“Stop what?”

“If you know, as your tone implies you do, what was annoying John,” Ike said, “would you share your knowledge with us?”

When you worked hard not to give in to irrational impulses, it was discouraging to get no response at all but emotionality.
His perfectly fair request merely drove the girl into speechless fury. The thick glasses glared at him a moment. He could
scarcely see her grey eyes through them. She stalked ahead and got into an elevator that seemed to open to accommodate her
rage. She didn’t hold the doors for them.

“So,” Ike said tiredly, waiting for the next elevator to Vermont. “What was that all about?”

Susan shrugged a little.

“I don’t understand this behavior. Why is she so hostile, so aggressive?”

It wasn’t a new question, perhaps, but Susan didn’t even make an effort to answer it. Her silence was almost hostile, and
he resented it. “What does she think this kind of behavior gains her? What is it she wants?”

“Timmy Kelly calls you Kike Rose,” Susan said. “So Esther told me. He calles her Kikey Rose at school. She said she liked
‘Glasseyes’ better.”

“Oh,” Ike said. “Oh—shit.”

“Exactly.”

They rode down to Vermont in silence.

Crossing the Common under the pseudostars he said, “I don’t even understand where he learned the word.”

“Who?”

“Timmy Kelly. He’s Esther’s age—a year younger. He grew up in the Colony just as she did. The Kellys joined the year after
we did. My God! We can keep out every virus, every bacterium, every spore, but this—this gets in? How? How can it be?—I tell
you, Susan, I think the monitors should be closed. Everything these children see and hear from earth is a lesson in violence,
bigotry, supersition.”

“He didn’t need to listen to the monitors.” Her tone was almost patronizingly patient.

“I worked with John at Moonshadow, close quarters, daily, for eight months,” he said. “There was nothing, nothing of this
sort.”

“It’s Pat more than John, actually,” Susan said in the same disagreeably dispassionate way. “Little sub-snubs on the Nutritional
Planning Committee, for years. Little jokes. ‘Would that be kosher—Susan?’ Well. So. You live with it.”

“Down below, yes, but here, in the Colony, in Spes—”

“Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people, hadn’t you noticed? Very elitist people. How could we be anything
but?”

“Conservative? Conventional? What are you talking about?”

“Well, look at us! Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century! I’m not
complaining, you know. I chose it too. I love feeling safe. I wanted the kids to be safe. But you pay for safety.”

“I don’t understand your attitude. We risked everything for Spes—because we’re future-oriented. These are the people who chose
to leave the past behind, to start fresh. To form a true human community and to do it right, to do it right, for once! These
people are innovators,
intellectually courageous, not a bunch of gutbrains sunk in their bigotries! Our average IQ is 165—”

“Ike, I know. I know the average IQ.”

“The boy is rebelling,” Ike said after a short silence. “Just as Esther is. Using the foulest language they know, trying to
shock the adults. It’s meaningless.”

“And John Kelly tonight?”

“Look, Mo was going on and on. All that about his damned souvenir pebble—he plays cute a good deal, you know. The kids he
teaches eat it up, but it gets pretty tiresome in committee. If John cut him off, he asked for it.”

They were at the door of their unit. It looked like the door of a New England frame house, though it hissed open sideways
when Ike touched the doorbell.

Esther had gone to her cube, of course. Lately she spent as little time as possible with them in the livingcube. Noah and
Jason had spread their diagrams, printouts, workbooks, a tri-di checkerboard all over the builtins and the floor, and sat
in the middle of it eating prochips and chattering away. “Tom’s sister says she saw her in the O.R.,” Jason was saying. “Hi,
Ike, hi, Susan. I don’t know, you can’t believe something some six-year-old says.”

“Yeah, she’s probably just imitating what Linda said, trying to get attention. Hi, Mom, hi, Dad. Hey, did you hear about this
burned woman Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack say they saw?”

“What do you mean, a burned woman?”

“Over by school in C-1 Corridor. They were going along, going to some girls’ meeting thing—”

“Dahncing clahss,” Jason interjected, striking a pose somewhere between a dying swan and a vomiting twelve-year-old.

“—and they claim they saw this woman they’d never seen before, how about that? How could there be anybody in Spes they’d never
even seen? And she was like burned all over, and sort of lurking along the side of the corridor like she was afraid of being
seen. And they say
she went down C-3 just before they got there, and when they did they couldn’t see her. And she wasn’t in any of the cubes
along C-3. And then Tom Fort’s little sister says she saw her in the O.R., Jason says, but she’s probably just trying to get
attention too.”

“She said she had white eyes,” Jason said, rolling his own blue ones. “Really gutwrenching.”

“Did the girls report this to anybody?” Ike asked.

“Treese and Linda? I don’t know,” Noah said, losing interest. “So, are we going to get more hands-on time with the Schoenfeldt?”

“I requested it,” Ike said. He was upset, disturbed. Esther’s unjustifiable anger, Susan’s lack of sympathy, and now Noah
and Jason telling ghost stories, quoting hysterical little girls about white-eyed phantoms: it was discouraging.

He went into his studycube and got to work projecting designs for the second ship, following Levaitis’s proposals. No fake
scenery, no props; the curves and angles of the structure exposed. The structural elements were rationally beautiful in their
necessity. Form follows function. Instead of an illusion like the Common, the major space in each quadrant would be just that,
a big space; call it the quad, maybe. Ten meters high, two hundred across, the arches of the hull reaching across it magnificently.
He sketched it out on the holo, viewed it from different angles, walked around it. … It was past three when he went to bed,
excited and satisfied by his work. Susan was fast asleep. He lay by her inert warmth and looked back on the events of the
evening; his mind was clearer in the dark. There was no anti-Semitism in Spes. Look how many of the colonists were Jews. He
was going to count, but found that he didn’t have to; the number seventeen was ready in his mind. It seemed less somehow than
he had thought. He ran through the names and came out with seventeen. Not as many as it might have been, out of eight hundred,
but a lot better than some other groups. There had been no problem recruiting people of Asiatic ancestry, in fact it seemed
the reverse, but the lack of African-ancestry colonists had caused long and bitter struggles of conscience over policy, back
in the Union. But there had been no way around the fact that in a closed community of only eight hundred, every single person
must be fit, not only genetically, but intellectually. And after the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation,
blacks just didn’t get the training. There had been few black applicants, even, and almost none of them had passed the rigorous
tests. They had been wonderful people, of course, but that wasn’t enough. Every adult on board had to be outstandingly competent
in several areas of expertise. There was no time to train people who had, through no fault of their own, been disadvantaged
from the start. It came down to what D.H. Maston, the “Father of Spes,” called the cold equations, from an old story he liked
to tell. “No dead weight on board!” was the moral of the story. “Too many lives depend on every choice we make! If we could
afford to be sentimental—if we could take the easy way—nobody would rejoice more sincerely than I. But we can have only one
criterion: excellence. Physical and mental excellence in every respect. Any applicant who meets that criterion is in. Any
one who doesn’t, is out.”

So even in the Union days there had only been three blacks in the Society. The genius mathematician Madison Aless had tragically
developed slow-rad symptoms, and after his suicide the Vezys, a brilliant young couple from England, had dropped out and gone
home; a loss not only to ethnicity but to multinationality in Spes, for it left only a handful from countries other than the
Union and the U.S.A. But, as Maston had pointed out, that meant nothing, because the concept of nationality meant nothing,
while the concept of community meant everything.

David Henry Maston had applied the cold equations to himself. Sixty-one when the Colony moved to California, he had stayed
behind in the States. “By the time Spes is built,” he had said, “I’ll be seventy. A seventy-year-old
man take up the place a working scientist, a breeding woman, a 200-IQ kid could fill? Don’t make jokes!” Maston was still
alive, down there. Now and then he came in on the Network from Indianapolis with some advice, always masterful, imperative,
though sometimes, these days, a bit off the mark.

But why was Ike lying here thinking about old Maston? His train of thought trailed off into the inco-herencies of advancing
sleep. Just as he relaxed, a thrill of terror jolted through him stiffening every muscle for a moment—the old fear from far,
far back, the fear of being helpless, mindless, the fear of sleep itself. Then that too was gone. Ike Rose was gone. A warm
body sighed in the darkness inside the little bright object balanced elegantly in the orbit of the moon.

Linda Jones and Treese Gerlack were twelve. When Esther stopped them to ask questions they were partly shy with her, and partly
rude, because even if she was sixteen, she was really gutwrenching-looking with those glass things she wore, and Timmy Kelly
called her Kikey, and Timmy Kelly was so incredibly gorge. So Linda sort of looked away and acted like she didn’t hear her,
but Treese was kind of flattered, actually. She laughed and said yeah they really had absolutely seen this gutwrenching woman
and she was really like burned all over, shiny, even her clothes burned off except sort of a rag thing. “Her breasts were
just hanging there and they were really weird, really long,” Treese said, “they were really gut, right? Hanging down. God!”

“Did she have white eyes?”

“You mean like Punky Fort said she saw? I don’t know. We weren’t all that close.”

“It was her teeth were white,” Linda said, unable to let Treese do all the describing. “They were all white, like a skull
would be, right, and like she had too many teeth.”

“Like in those history vids,” Treese said, “you know, all those people that used to live where that was before the desert,
right, Africa? That’s what she looked like. Like those famine people. Do you think there was some accident they didn’t tell
us about? Maybe EVA? And she got like fried, and went crazy, and she’s hiding now.”

They weren’t stupid, Treese and Linda, not at all—no doubt IQs over 150 like everybody else—but they’d been born in the Colony.
They’d never lived outside.

Esther had. She remembered. The Roses had joined when she was seven. She remembered all sorts of stuff about the city where
they had lived before they joined, Philadelphia; stuff like cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, and her best friend in the
building, Saviora, who had ten million little tiny short braids each one tied with a red thread and a blue bead. Her best
friend in the building and in the Building Mothers’ School and in the world. Until she had to go live in the United States
and then Bakersfield and be decontaminated, decontaminated of everything, the germs and viruses and funguses, the roaches
and the radiation and the rain, the red threads and the blue beads and the bright eyes. “Hey I’ll see for you, ole blindy-eyes,”
Saviora had said when Esther had the first operation and it didn’t help. “I just be your eyes, OK? And you be my brain, OK,
in arithmetic?”

It was weird how she could remember that, nearly ten years ago. She could hear Saviora’s voice, the way she sang the word
“arithmetic,” with a fall and rise in it so it sounded like something foreign, incomprehensible, marvelous, blue and red….

“Arith-metic,” she said aloud, going down BB Corridor, but she could not say it right.

All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman. But that didn’t explain how she got into 2-C, or the O.R., or onto
the Plaza in Florida, where a girl called Oona Chang and her little brother claimed to have seen her last night just after
sun-out.

Oh, shit, I just wish I could see, Esther Rose thought
as she walked across the Common, which to her was a blue-green blur. What’s the use? That woman could be walking in front
of me right now and I wouldn’t even know it, I’d think it was just somebody that belonged. Anyhow how could there be a stowaway?
After a year and a half in space? Where’s she been till now? And there hasn’t been any accident. It’s just kids. Playing ghosts,
trying to scare each other and getting scared. Getting scared of those old history vids, those black faces, grinning with
famine, when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat.

“The Sleep of Reason engenders monsters,” Esther Rose said aloud. She had pored over the Monuments of Western Art file in
the library because even though she couldn’t see the world, or even Spes, she could see pictures if they were close enough.
Engravings were the best, they didn’t go all to blobs of color when she enlarged them on the screen, but kept making sense,
the strong black lines, the shadows and highlights that built up the forms. Goya, it was. The bat things coming out of the
man’s head while he slept at a table full of books, and down below were the words that meant “The Sleep of Reason engenders
monsters” in English, the only language she would ever know. Roaches, rain, Spanish, all washed away. Of course Spanish was
in the AI. Everything was. You could learn Spanish if you wanted to. But what use could it possibly be, when the AI could
translate it into English faster than you could read or think? What use would there be knowing some language that nobody spoke
but you?