The Fresco (16 page)

THURSDAY

Despite her anger, partly at Carlos, mostly at herself, Benita had fallen asleep almost immediately. She did not waken until about eight on Thursday morning, when the phone rang.

The voice was Chiddy's. “Are you all right, Benita?”

She nodded, then realized Chiddy couldn't see the nod. “Yes,” she said.

“You were unhappy last night. You don't sound happy now.”

She didn't mean to talk about Carlos, but the words spilled out. “My son, Carlos. He's a very manipulative person. I hoped when he went away to school, he'd grow out of it. But he's still doing it. I wish he'd just…grow up and let me alone.”

“This wish is not improper. Does your husband share this characteristic of manipulating?”

She thought about it. “Well, yes. Until I caught onto it.” Which had only taken—what? A lifetime?

Chiddy sighed. “It is one of the tragedies of your biology, Benita. Your men and women are often insufficiently selective in the mating practices. We have noted you people do
not consider that your children will have the worst traits of either parent, often to a great degree. In our opinion, women in your world who are under the age of thirty and who wish to mate should require the approval of a board of qualified geneticists and behaviorists. Alas, that is unlikely to happen. Is that all you were upset about?”

His tone made her choke. It was so sympathetic and yet so very superior and above it all. “Well, General McVane didn't keep his word to us about not telling anyone. But the First Lady was very kind, and I don't think the media found out who I am.”

“Speaking from what we have seen of your people, they will find out, sooner or later. Your congressman has allowed himself to be persuaded by McVane and others. They already know who you are. They do not know where you are, however, which we will try to keep private for the time being.”

“Why do reporters have to dig into people's privacy?” she fumed.

“Communication is much like sex.”

This set her back. “I don't understand…”

A chuckle. “Being celibate is often wise and prudent. People know this, but the inborn drive to reproduce makes their organs wag. Keeping silent is often wise and prudent. People know this, also, but the drive to question and tell makes their tongues wag. Sex spreads genetic material, good and bad; prying spreads information, true and false; natural selection takes over and both ethical failings contribute to continuing evolution.”

She laughed. “I wish there were ways to do it that were less troublesome. Did you know that the Secretary of State is going to fix up my new apartment for me? She says to save time, but I imagine it's to keep an eye on me.”

“Interesting,” said Chiddy.

“So, maybe I'll see you after I move in?”

“You will, yes. Have you any questions?”

“I have some, yes. One is…I didn't realize you were depending on me to go on working with you, and I've told Simon I will work for him. I owe him my full-time effort, you
know. If he's paying me, it wouldn't be ethical not to give him a fair day's work.”

“What you do for us will be very simple, Benita. It will take very little time.”

“And…the money you gave me. I really didn't need all that. I should give the rest of it back.”

“That is our standard payment for the kind of service you will be rendering. It doesn't obligate you to do anything for us that your conscience finds abhorrent.”

“In that case, well, thank you.”

“No thanks needed. Do you have another question?”

“I don't really understand just what the requirements are that we humans have to meet in order to be members of your Confederation. Since I'm the intermediary, I ought to understand them, shouldn't I?”

“Yes, you should. The preliminary requirement is Neighborliness, as we have said. Learning to get along together without blowing up people or shooting children from cars or oppressing people because of perceived dissimilarities to oneself. Once that has been achieved, there are only a few formalities. First, we require a volunteer liaison person from your planet, someone who must be intimately connected to the process of mutuality. We call this person the Link. We will also need a profile person to travel among our various worlds while the members of the Confederation establish biological parameters for your race. This person, we call the Pattern.”

“Is that it?”

“Become neighborly, give us a Link and a Pattern, then a short probationary period, and that's it. Does that answer your question.”

She wasn't satisfied, but she didn't know what would be more satisfying. “Yes, I think so. Thank you.”

“Thank you, Benita. We will be in touch.”

THURSDAY

In Israel, first light had brought helicopter flights over the city of Jerusalem. The mile-deep hole followed the serrated polygon of the old city walls. Vanished were the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock, El Aqsa Mosque, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Via Dolorosa. Gone were the Citadel and the Antonia Fortress, the Zion Gate, the Jaffa Gate. Gone was the entire Old City: Arab Quarter, Jewish Quarter, Armenians, Greek Orthodox, odds and ends of varietal Christians and all.

When the sun got high enough to reflect off the inside lip of the chasm, large gold letters appeared just below the western edge in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and Arabic. Further examination found other languages, ancient and modern, extending along the north and eastern sides. At midmorning, former residents of the Old City were seen approaching the city from various directions, on foot, most in their bed clothes. No one was hurt, though many were thirsty and hungry, and all said they'd left others out in the desert or along the roads or in the smaller towns or villages in which they themselves had wakened. The International Red Cross/Red Crescent arrived a few hours later, though the
Israeli army had already set up a tent city for the displaced, divided by hastily erected barriers into areas for various religious or ethnic groups who might otherwise be expected to fall upon one another in a frenzy of mutual accusation.

The news was carried by CNN before full light, and was reprised every quarter hour thereafter as the country turned toward the sun, allowing more of the chasm's southern and then eastern faces to be illuminated. As each new language appeared, an appropriate scholar was summoned to the CNN newsroom to pontificate upon the meaning of the words, though in each case the meaning was the same, whether in Latin, Coptic, Armenian, Aramaic, or various forms of ancient or modern Hebrew or Greek: “Jerusalem was to be a city of holy peace. Without peace, it is not to be.”

When telescopes were brought and focused far down on the walls, the message was seen to have been augmented with another phrase, also in multiple languages. “Next time, the hole will be bigger.”

THURSDAY

In the U.S., in the office of the president, that gentleman was closeted with a number of his close advisors, all of them trying to figure out what to say or, indeed, whether it was appropriate to say anything except “Wow,” or something sanctimonious starting with the words, “Today God has seen fit to remind us…”

“That idiot McVane would ask them to prove it!” snarled the Secretary of State, who was in a waspish mood. She had slept badly and had already spent a good part of the morning alternately assuring the Israeli Prime Minister, the Vatican, the Eastern Orthodox Church, a handful of American evangelicals and charismatics, and the Palestinian Ambassador that no, the U.S. had no weapons advanced enough to have dug that hole without damaging a single citizen. A big hole, yes, maybe, but one that cleanly followed ancient city walls and didn't kill so much as a sparrow, no. She had pointed out that even the cars that had gone over the brink had been found in the desert, their occupants asleep but unharmed. Ethical behavior, she had said repeatedly, was often abridged by the possible, and the U.S. lacked the know-how to behave in such an ethical manner.

“You think the ETs did this?” asked the president. “You're sure?”

“Of course they did it,” the SOS snarled once more. “They asked us, remember? At dinner. What some of our problems were.”

“They asked me during our meeting, too. I mentioned the Middle East.”

“They asked about Afghanistan, and your wife mentioned women's rights in that context. I mentioned the fact that in Africa national boundaries were established by colonial powers without taking tribalism into account…”

“So, what do we expect to happen next?” he grated. “All the women disappear? All the tribes in Africa?”

“I don't know,” she said.

“You're afraid to know,” he said, biting his lip. “So am I.”

She muttered, “I don't suppose we could just ask them to go home?”

He laughed, without humor. “They warned us not even to think about that. They don't go home. Not until they're finished or they give up.”

 

JERUSALEM DISAPPEARS
WORLD WONDERS AT ACT OF GOD

 

MYSTERIOUS MESSAGES CONFOUND SCIENCE
UNEARTHLY FORCES DEMAND PEACE

 

FUNDAMENTALISTS GREET DISAPPEARANCE
AS OVERTURE TO LAST DAYS

 

JERUSALEM TRANSPORTED TO HEAVEN, SAYS FALWELL
HOLY CITY TO RETURN AFTER ANTICHRIST

 

THOUSANDS GATHER TO AWAIT SECOND COMING
BAPTISTS CROWD SOUTHERN MOUNTAINTOPS

 

RUMORS OF PLAGUE IN AFGHANISTAN
KABUL REQUESTS AID FROM CDC

As an athyco, it was to'eros task, that is, my task, dear Benita, to design remedies for societies, including our own, that did not work well. Yes, Benita, sometimes even our own society does not work as well as it should. I find comfort in this, when I am confronted with some problem difficult of solution. Patience, I say to myself. Even we have problems we have not put an end to.

After spending several years both reading case histories of other athyci who had worked in prior centuries and solving thought problems under the guidance of my mentor, ton was sent to the village of Quo-Tem to solve a problem that had come up in recent years. It was in Quo-Tem that ton first met the person who was to be to'eros long-term workmate, Vess. Of course, no one in the village called ais Vess. In the village Vess and Chiddy were called Aisos Torsummi or Aisos Torsum. Earthlings would say, Their Excellencies or His Excellency or even, if speaking directly to us, Your Excellency, though our language does not have an easy equivalent to “you.” In our society such directness is considered rude. Among intimates and when referring to self, we use the first level undifferentiated, casteless pronouns we learned as
children, with a mouthpart gesture to indicate whether we refer to self or other.
Ton,
I or you.
To'er,
me or you.
To'eros,
mine or yours.
Ton'i,
we or you.
To'eri,
us or you.
To'erosi,
our or your. In speaking to others, especially to groups of differing castes, we speak always of “one,” using the pronoun of the highest caste present.
Ke
(or li or ai)
afar.
One serves.
Ker
(or lic, or ais)
afari.
Serve it to one.
Keros
(or licos or aisos)
ca fi.
It is one's.

Since this document is intended for you, dear Benita, I continue the struggle to put it in your words.
Ça fi shunus to'erosi afarim.
It is our joy to serve.

Vess and
I
were soon on a confidential basis, Chiddy and Vess, to'eri, new athyci. The problem in Quo-Tem, which was a farming community, mostly campesi, had to do with the communal lands on which the people grazed the village livestock. Over the past century, the number of persons in the town had increased, the herds had likewise increased, and the public lands could no longer support the number of beasts. Riverbanks were destroyed, the plants that held the soil were killed, good soil was being washed downstream, into other communities.

In all problems, athyci are required to keep the great fundamental truths in mind. Some of these are as follows: Resources are finite. Some things are not renewable. Intelligent creatures must give way to irreplaceable achievements. One cannot explain to a tree or a forest that it must either grow without water or move to another place, but one can explain to a person that it must go somewhere else, where water is available. As we say, “The health of a forest outweighs both the tears of a nootch and the plaint of an athyco.” After all, it may take half a millennium or more to achieve similar trees while it would take only a few decades to achieve a new nootch or a new athyco. Of course, it is easier for us than for your governing bodies since we do not consider our temporary inconvenience as superior to the needs of permanently essential forests and seas. We are taught to think in many lifetimes, not only in the short span of our own. This kind of thinking is, in your language, Darwinian, since only people who think this way will survive in the long run. The
fact that your Madagascar and your Brazil and several of your African countries will be incapable of supporting either flora or fauna within thirty years are cases in point.

On Quo-Tem we first had to determine why the number of persons had increased. We have a saying, “False reasons grow like weeds.” It is true. There are as many false reasons as there are neurons to fire them off, but problems cannot be solved using false reasons. Real reasons are of utmost importance. We looked at the data. Years before, several of the undifferentiated young of Quo-Tem had been selected as inceptors more or less simultaneously. This was a statistical blip, but such things happen. As is the way with inceptors, ke'i had accumulated receptors, some from Quo-Tem and some from outside, three here, four there, and the receptors had recruited nootchi for the creating of young. The young had grown, and while some had been selected out into other areas, more had returned to the village, mostly those we call the glusi, the not-very-able-ones, the perpetually undifferentiated, the ones who do not come to mind when one gives thanks.

Return to one's ancestral place is a right we try very hard to guarantee, but another of our immutable facts is: Managers always recruit the top layers among persons, for such persons will reflect well upon them, and the lower one's ability, the higher the chance one will be left where one is. In time, therefore, Quo-Tem had grown top heavy with glusi. While glusi eat no more and take no more space than others, they use up space and resources without regenerating them. They tend to destroy in that way, by sucking energy, or through undirected energy of their own, or through ineptitude or even, sometimes, malice. There is no cure for a glut of glusi except not to beget them in the first place, but by the time one knows one has a glut, it is too late.

The moment that the people-load had gone beyond the numbers allowed to the village, the strain should have been brought to the attention of the athyci. Why had that not happened? Because the former recording-campes responsible for assembling and transmitting information, a very able person, had died at that time, and ke had not been replaced.
No one had gone to the bureau of selectors and told lic'i a recording-campes was needed. So, the imbalance had gone on and gone on, and now the situation was at a point where no acceptable solution was possible. No matter what Vess and I did, persons would be greatly disturbed, even angry, both the innocent and the persons responsible.

We faced this anger resolutely. Panel number seven of the Fresco,
The Adoration,
is an inspiration in such times. In it, Mengantowhai, who has made massive changes in the lives of the Jaupati in order to bring them peace, is hailed by them as their savior. I always think of this when I am required to bring trouble or pain to our people. In the end, I say, they will be thankful for it.

We needed to know whether the glut of glusi was achieved out of ignorance or whether it had been deliberate. We started our inquiry with the campesi. Unbelievably, after millennia of refinement in our methods, some campesi still end up believing they have not been properly selected; some still resent having been selected at all! Even today we may find one who croaks like a pfluggi and wants to be a singer. Or one who has all the grace of a puyox but wants to dance. Or another one, who cannot add up the same figures twice with the same answer, who wants to be a proffe, what you call an engineer! I feel gratitude that such longings are rare. Though most campesi require only slight adjusting to be content, for a few there is no soothing. We have a saying, “There is no misery like misdreaming.” Or, as earthlings might say, “No tragedy like false ambition.”

It would be necessary, we found, to cut the village population by about a third, to reduce grazing on the lands by more than half for a lengthy period, and to undertake strenuous regeneration of the lands, which would require the labor of all campesi in Quo-Tem for some time. This meant the other categories who remained would have to do their own chores for a time, which is proper. We are taught, “An inescapable burden must fall equally upon all castes.”

As athyci, it was our job to choose who would stay and who would go. The first task was to message the need everywhere, at first to the places of that world, then, if necessary,
to other settled worlds. So many inceptors, so many receptors, so many nootchi, so many undifferentiated ones, so many campesi, all to find places for. When the returns came in, we began the allocation. Receptors and associated nootchi to the same places, when possible. If not possible, then interviews with them to assess their relative willingness to separate. Some receptors, luckily, were willing to be separated, and others, who had reached or exceeded the number of young required of them, wanted to be reselected to nonreceptor caste.

Few of the nootchi and none of the inceptors wanted to be reselected. This is most often true of inceptors. Their lives are centered on gratifying their mating organ to the extent they cannot even visualize doing something else. It was at this juncture we found that several of the inceptors were closely related, that several of them shared the same cell parents, even the same nootch!

This explained everything! While organ gratification comes first with inceptors, progeny pride comes second! Inceptors who have the same lineage have been known to engage in progeny
competition,
even when, as was the case here, the progeny were not of very high quality. When we noticed this, we marked all the related inceptors for retirement therapy.

We then moved on to the undifferentiated ones, those not yet twelve. Undifferentiated ones are easiest. So long as they have a good nootch, they are usually content. We identified all those procreated by the inceptors in question and tagged them in the records as nonbreeder stock, even if they showed great aptitude for the task. It is an unfortunate truth that inceptors and receptors of very little brain are often very skilled with the generative organ and emit very strong mating smells. That is one of the reasons our selectors must be extremely careful in their choices. It is rather like politics or policing: those who most enjoy the work are often those who should not be doing it!

When we were finished, we had retired or allocated all but the leftover campesi, mostly old ones or glusi, the offspring of the inceptors we had already tagged. As earthlings
would say, the bottom of the barrel. A few were old enough to refer to the farms for the aged, but several had to be sent to the sleep gardens. Though we do not publicize these arrangements, persons may sleep in the gardens up to one hundred years, and this is usually more than adequate time to find places even for supernumerary campesi. The settlement of new planets requires many such, and we Pistach are usually settling somewhere.

When Vess and I had finished, we knew that unhappiness and trauma had been minimized to the extent possible. Still, we felt the strain of that which remained! The pride of the inceptors had been unavoidably damaged and a number of the nootchi had been aggrieved. Nootchi grow very attached to their home place, and it is hard for them to move. They have spent years weaving a village, planning it, decorating it with gardens, laying out its walks and pretty-places and play areas for the young. Nootchi are the cement of a community, they stick fast, and it is like flaying a fluggle to tug them away.

In any case, persons from all four village categories came to us, as we knew they would, to complain. It was during our last formal session. They bowed, calling us Aisos Torsummi. They presented their petition and asked redress of grievance. We inquired whether they wanted vengeance, and they affirmed this. Such an imbalance was someone's fault; their grief demanded redress. While we knew the real trouble had started with the selectors who had sent too many inceptors of the same, faulty lineage back to this village, we did not say so, for the selectors were not answerable to people below them in caste. We would take care of that ourselves.

Nonetheless, we told the villagers a truth: that the trouble began when the recording-campes died. The inceptor who was then the village master had the duty of requesting a new recording-campes. Ke had not done so. That inceptor was still alive, and keros name was such and such, and the aggrieved had our permission to kill ker, if they wished, though we advised them it would be courteous to listen first to keros explanation.

Since inceptor in question had been retired to an aged persons' farm at some distance, vengeance would require the aggrieved to make a lengthy trip. Serially, the aggrieved ones declaimed their intention of doing so, and we made note of their intentions so they would have no trouble getting travel permission. Their actually going to the aged persons' farm was unlikely. Since many of those in the group would be sent to their new homes on the following day, thus separating them from one another, it was doubtful they would ever get around to confronting the old inceptor. Grievance and anger need a certain heat of immediacy and a constant draft of rhetoric to keep them burning. This is why humans who explain their anger to counselors and psychologists go on being angry; they fan their anger with a constant hurricane of reminiscence. Separating those who are aggrieved is like raking out a fire, a good way of cooling things down, while the process of formulating their grievance served both to focus and to ameliorate their feelings. Knowing who was to blame, they would not waste energy on other targets.

Our last few hours on Quo-Tem were spent with the most able campesi, those who would remain, and the current village manager who was, luckily, a person of some administrative talent, though he had not had the will or the authority to do what we had done. Village managers live by the will of the village, and villages make painful changes only when they are in agony. When agony is not present, no matter how imminent it looms, painful change must come from outside. This is a truth. We detailed the measures that would be necessary to restore the land to health and we swore ker'i to the task, however long it might take. The few inceptors who were left in the village were forbidden to initiate breeding until the task was done, and the village master was given the necessary medications to quell all mating odors and assure compliance. As a parting gift, we gave the village, as was customary, worms from our own home lands, thus tying their fate to ours and our future to theirs. We have a saying, “Where one lives, all live; where one suffers, all suffer.”
One,
in our language, includes all living things. In your language
someone has said, “No man is an island,” which encompasses the concept but which, by mentioning only mankind, misses the point.