Other Projects: Speculative/Science Fiction
LDSF-3
LDSF-3
*** Title page
Copyright 1987 by Parables
ISBN 0-96114960-0-2
DEDICATION
Children are a very important part of several stories and poems in this book: “A Visit to the Holy Land,” “Jerusalem,” “The Selfish Giant,” “The Fringe,” “The Aborted Child,” “The Old Man and His Rest,” “The Birthday Party,” “Act of Faith,” “Breeding Will Out,” “The Meeting,” “The Gift,” “Questions,” “The King’s Heir,” “Eyes of Rain,” etc. The illustration by Nancy-Lou Patterson represents these children, as well as those to whom the book is dedicated.
Dedicated to all children who have been, are, will be and may be.
Especially to Matt, Brigham, Heber, Johnny, David, Isaac, George, Matthew, Wesley, Bruce, Larry, Timmy, Adam, Dustin, Justin, Barret, Sean, Nando, Estefania, Paola, Ursula, Alexander, Jason, Troy, Avi, Erez, Chris, Muhammad, Uri, Jim, Andrea, Todd, Nathaniel, Idrissa, Israel, Daniel, Danny, Roy, Vincent, Mitsu, Richard, Fay Ellen, Kayla, Robbie, Robin, Donny, Joshua, Mitsu, Mark, Song, Chad, Will, Cade, Noah, Benjamin
PUBLISHER’S DISCLAIMER
I think you’ll agree that our present volume is the best yet, not only because it has more stories in it, but because the stories are even more exploratory, experimental, and, in some cases, just plain bizarre. Do we dare suggest that the mere existence of the previous two anthologies in this series may have encouraged greater freedom of thought and daring creativity? Let this be one more attempt to do so.
CONTENTS
Foreword: A Literature for a Cosmic Religion,
Science Fiction and Mormonism by Benjamin Urrutia
Introduction: Science Fiction and Mormonism by Sandy and Joe Straubhaar
How It Happened by Isaac Asimov
A Visit to the Holy Land: Being A Sequel to Mr. Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” by Benjamin Urrutia
Jerusalem by William Blake
The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde
Black Walnut by Eugene England
Poems by Benjamin Urrutia
Professor Tolkien Enters Heaven
In the Beginning
When the Stars Begin to Fall by Will Salmon
The Fringe by Orson Scott Card
Conspiracies by J.N. Williamson
Excerpts From Giudizio Universale (Universal Judgment) by Giovanni Papini, translated by Benjamin Urrutia
The Aborted Child by Nathan Alterman
The Hymn of the Soul - Anonymous
Mozart and the Light of Music by Gary Gillum
The Old Man and His Rest, A Fairy Tale by Bruce Young
The Birthday Party by Sue Cutler
Near-Light by Addie LaCoe
Act of Faith by Addie LaCoe
Breeding Will Out by Addie LaCoe
And Ever the Twain Shall Meet by Scott S. Smith
Deathsong by Michael R. Collings
The Tables Turned
The Meeting
Should Men Be Ordained: A Theological Challenge by Gracia Fay Ellwood
The Gift by Kitty Carr Tilton
Questions by Kitty Carr Tilton
The Umbrella by Frederick A. Israelsen
Curds and Way by Chris Frank Heimerdinger
Poems by Gracia Fay Ellwood
- Kyria Sophia
- The Lady of La Salette
- The World
Ask Dr. Goodstate, Your Factory-Trained Quantum Mechanic by Jack Weyland
The King’s Heir by Martine Bates
First Lips by James “The Puff” Wright
The Forbidden Room by Will Salmon
Eyes of Rain by Addie LaCoe
Written in Pencil Inside the Sealed Freight Car by Dan Pagis
The Sinful Solution by Benjamin Urrutia
Limerick by Saki
Biographical Notes
Bibliography
“How It Happened,” copyright 1986 by Isaac Asimov
“The Fringe,” copyright 1985 by Orson Scott Card
“Breeding Will Out,” reprinted from Fungi Winter 1985
“Eyes of Rain,” copyright 1986 by Fantasy Book Enterprises
“Professor Tolkien Enters Heaven,” reprinted from Mythlore
“Conspiracies,” reprinted from SPWAO Showcase IV
“Kyria Sophia,” reprinted from Mythlore
“The Lady of La Salette,” reprinted from Mythlore
“The World,” reprinted from Mythlore
“Should Men Be Ordained,” reprinted from Daughters of Sarah
“The Tables Turned,” reprinted from Dialogue
“The Meeting,” reprinted from Dialogue
FOREWORD
A LITERATURE FOR A COSMIC RELIGION
by Benjamin Urrutia
Speaking of Science Fiction, C. S. Lewis said, “If you have a religion it must be cosmic; therefore it seems to me odd that this genre was so late in arriving.” I share his astonishment, all the more because I am a Latter-day Saint, and our religion is even more cosmic than others. Joseph Smith said something that sounds like a strong restatement of what Lewis said: “Thy mind, O Man, if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heaven and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss and the broad expanse of eternity.” Unfortunately, most Latter-day Saints have completely ignored these words of Brother Joseph. They prefer, in Literature as in everything else, to stay with the comfortable and the familiar. Like Medieval Monks, or like Hobbits, they prefer to read books that tell them only what they already know. Any work, fiction or nonfiction, that dares to explore the unknown must be heretical or anti-Gospel, a terrible threat that must be avoided.
The irony of it all is that this fear of too many Saints against speculative fiction (or Science Fiction, as we call it) has the same roots as the fear and hatred that anti-Mormons feel towards the Restored Gospel. They also want to read only what they have read before, to be told only the same stories they have been hearing for two thousand years. The notion that there could be other inspired books, besides the sixty-six that they are already well familiar with, is one that fills them with horror.
Timidity, however, is only one obstacle that stands in the way towards the development of a cosmic literature. There is also the danger of superficiality. The obvious example is found in many episodes of Battlestar Galactica. The creator of this TV series, a Latter-day Saint, peppered the scripts with references to the Council of the Twelve, the planet Kobol (a variant of Kolob), and to eternal marriage. These references constitute only window dressing and not an exploration of the cosmic potentialities of the Gospel. Only in one episode that I saw was there an attempt to go to a deeper level. An angel named John (either John the Baptist or John the Beloved) persuades the crew of the Battlestar to use its superior weaponry to destroy all the intercontinental ballistic missiles that have been launched on the planet Terra (a near-identical twin of our own world in its near future). In other words, God has intervened (in a manner so subtle that divine intervention won’t even be suspected by most people) to prevent humanity from destroying itself on one of God’s worlds. This episode of Battlestar Galactica can be held up as a good example of LDS Science Fiction.
It is not necessary, I should point out, for a writer to be LDS in order to deal with elements of the Gospel, since these are shared with many other religions and philosophies, to some extent. For an example, let us look at what we call the Word of Wisdom, and other people would call abstinence from tobacco, alcohol and other attractive but deadly poisons.
The matter is dealt with briefly and humorously, in a quite delightful manner, by Vonda McIntyre in her excellent Star Trek novel,
“This is tobacco, Mr. Scott. It
contains noxious chemicals.”
Spock regarded the cigar a moment
longer. “I believe I understand. During a time of critical
overpopulation, the
birth of a child would have required an adult to die. The adults
resorted to a sort
of lottery to decide who must make way. Your customs…fascinating. Not
efficient, but fascinating.”
He then declines to participate in that sort of Russian roulette. Later in the novel he avers that the difference between Terran and Vulcan traditions is that Vulcan traditions make sense.
Now all this is only a tiny fraction of a long and complex novel—one which, by the way, I strongly recommend. The Word of Wisdom occupies a far more central position in a very short, but marvelous story by Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson is most famous for writing
Now I must talk about Science Fiction writers who are both LDS and profound—which means, of course, talking about Orson Scott Card. He is an excellent writer, even a great writer, and one of the secrets of his greatness is that he knows how to write about the pain of the human heart. I have heard him say that when you begin to write, one of the first questions you ask yourself is: Who is in pain? It seems to me that another question he asks—and perhaps he answers— is: Why? Why, as the popular phrase has it, do such evil things happen to good people? The atheist has an easy answer. For those of us who believe, the problem is far more difficult.
In Ender’s Game, a great classic by Orson Scott Card, we have the story of a young boy named Andrew but nicknamed Ender. He has super intelligence and a sweet, gentle soul. He is sent to a military academy in outer space where he is subjected to hideous pressures, amounting to torture. Why? Because he is being trained to become Mankind’s military leader, the greatest since Alexander. The people who put him through torment do not hate him—on the contrary, they love him—and they are not sadists, either. But they believe that the only way he can fulfill his destiny is to go through this horrible pressure that will either destroy him or force him to fulfill his potential to become the greatest soldier of all and Mankind’s best hope against its enemies.
From an LDS viewpoint, Ender stands for Everyman. The reason he suffers is the reason we all suffer: we are being prepared for a great destiny, and we can only reach this potential by being put through much affliction: “All these things shall give you experience.” (Doctrine and Covenants, section 122, verse 7.)
Unfortunately, this message in Ender’s Game is rather spoiled by the fact that it turns out after all that it was not really necessary to develop Ender into such a great soldier, because the enemy was not really evil and ruthless. The war is nothing but a horrible misunderstanding, and it would have been much better to use Ender’s talents to communicate with the aliens, not to destroy them. But then, this is also a Gospel message.
So now we come to what I consider the Great LDS Novel: The Worthing Chronicle by Orson Scott Card. Let me quote you this paragraph from page 254:
“They’ve found God…in his starship
at the bottom of the sea. He’s asleep, but we can wake him up if we
want to.
One thing is certain, though. He’s just a man.”
The God in question is named Jason Worthing. I think the initials J.W. are significant, as they seem to hint of the name Yahweh or Jehovah. That may or may not be the case, but it is perfectly clear that Jason has become a God by enduring an education very similar to Ender’s—one, that is, that consists largely of horrible suffering inflicted on him not out of hatred or sadism, but by somebody who loves him and wants him to reach his full potential. He learns this lesson well and eventually decides it applies to humanity in general as well as it applies to him. But he goes to sleep (after having peopled a whole world with inhabitants, some of them his descendants in the flesh) and while he sleeps his children develop powers even greater than his own and use these powers to protect all human beings throughout the galaxy from all pain and suffering. When he is awakened, Jason rebukes his children for “stealing from them [from mankind] all that makes them human.” (page 258.)
These are profoundly LDS themes—the potential of a human being to achieve Godhood, the temptation to take away free agency from mankind in order to spare them pain and suffering. Such questions could not even be asked, let alone answered, in a novel that took place on Earth in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
Of course, there are many other things that could be said about The
INTRODUCTION
SCIENCE FICTION AND MORMONISM
by Sandy and Joe Straubhaar
Much has happened in the mood of the science fiction writer/fan subculture since we first (in 1981) wrote the article which follows, but the most notable trend as far as we are concerned has been a much greater tolerance displayed by science fiction writers and readers towards religious topics. The phenomenal success of Gene Wolfe in the last few years, for instance, is presumably not an aberration but an accurate indication that frankly religious writing (of a relatively traditional kind, not just vague metaphysics) no longer embarrasses the hypothetical “average” science fiction reader today. We have altered and added to our article to accommodate this trend as we see it—as of early 1984. (Who knows what may have come along by the time this book sees publication?)
The second major alteration in the article has been to pare down considerably our remarks on the works of fellow Saint Orson Scott Card. They have made us some unexpected friends and enemies and have stirred up passions of surprising intensity and endurance. Perhaps our best move here would be to advise our readers to read his books and judge for themselves. We, for our part, are uncomfortable with the fact that we seem to have (in
Science fiction covers a log of cultural turf in contemporary society, including pop science, pop sociology, and even pop theology. Science fiction provides a myriad of visions of what humans may become and achieve: it deals with technological gimmickry, social turnabouts, the development of men into gods, creative mythology, thinly veiled religion, and thinly veiled sex and violence. Popular reactions to Mormons and Mormonism crop up surprisingly often in the pages of science fiction novels. Mormons can read it, react to it, get insight from it, be provoked by it. Mormons have been known to write it—of which we will speak again below.
In 1980, we became acquainted with two manuscripts. The first one, by Michael Collings, cleverly titled “Strangers in Estranged Lands” [published in the Autumn 1984 issue of Dialogue as “Refracted Visions and Future Worlds: Mormonism and Science Fiction”], maintains that since Mormon theology and science fiction extrapolate different specific futures for the universe, there can be no truce between the believers in the two doctrines; and this is why Mormons in science fiction novels are often caricatured as dogma-ridden cultists. The second manuscript, a review by Gary Gillum of several of Orson Scott Card’s books, maintains that Card, a Mormon writer who has had some success in the science fiction field, imbues his works with a profound gospel-centered moral sense which may have missionary effects on the Gentile readership. Our reactions to these articles resulted in a series of lively dinner-table conversations and eventually to the paragraphs which follow.
We focus on three interrelated subjects: the overlap, as we see it, between science fiction and traditional religious concepts; Mormons as caricatured in science fiction; and the accomplishments of Mormons in science fiction writing and related endeavors.
Hugh Nibley has remarked that science fiction is today’s popular eschatology, because it concerns itself with what is to come. This is certainly true but doesn’t go far enough. Science fiction has become today’s popular-culture theology in general. Science fiction fans who might be embarrassed to ponder or discuss the time-honored metaphysical questions which religion (with a capital R) traditionally attempts to answer, can be fascinated by the same questions when they are presented in science fiction form. Popular audiences have felt religious awe watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind or suspended their possible disbelief in God long enough to believe in the Force while watching Star Wars. In fact the most insistent and common themes in science fiction have been unashamedly religious ones, albeit in modified or technological guise. Here are just a few of these themes:
First Theme: Who are we, we human beings, and where are we headed? What are the possibilities of human progression and development? These questions are dealt with in Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History series, i Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 and The Last and First Men and Odd John, in A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan, in Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League and Flandry books, in Spider Robinson’s Stardance, and in scores of other books. In fact, human progression or advancement to some kind of new evolutionary level seems to be a kind of Article of Faith for prominent science fiction wirters, particularly the “classic” authors of the thirties, forties, and fifties.
Second Theme: Who, specifically, am I, the individual? Do I have free will, or is someone or something else running the show? One of the most common science fiction and fantasy plots involves a heroic quest on the part of a single individual to recover or remember his or her true heritage and destiny, to seek out what ultimate truths can be found, to find whether one has free will. Two of these questers, Michael Moorcock’s Elric (male) and Tanith Lee’s Karrakaz (female), hope to find their ultimate truths in sacred books for which they quest. Unfortunately, Elric’s book, once found, dissolves into dust, and Karrakaz’ book turns out to be completely blank. The messages of the gods are ambiguous; but the ultimate truth for the individual soul can be found, at least in a sense.
Third Theme, related to the Second: The emotion which C.S. Lewis has called “Christian joy,” the homesickness of the exiled soul for its country of true origin and ultimate destination, is certainly a common feature of science fiction. Nowhere does it manifest itself more clearly than in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber. The exiled and amnesiac Prince Corwin suddenly remembers his homeland with these words, which we believe are deliberately intended to remind the reader of Psalm 137: “Amber…I remember thee. I shall never forget thee again. I guess, deep inside me, I never really did, through all those centuries I wandered the Shadow Earth, for often at night my dreams were troubled by images of thy green and golden spires and thy sweeping terraces…Amber, immortal city from which every other city has taken its shape. I cannot forget thee, even now…”1
Fourth Theme: Are there gods? If so, do they deserve our worship? What happens if we leave our place of birth and find that not all people worship as we do or that our new knowledge of the universe outside seems to contradict or invalidate our beliefs? These are the themes of Michael Moorcock in virtually all of his works, of Poul Anderson in The High Crusade and The Merman’s Children, of Joan D. Vinge in Mother and Child, and of Ursula K. LeGuin in The Tombs of Atuan.
Fifth Theme: To what degree are we responsible for our actions? How can atonement be made for our misdeeds, particularly those which have affected others adversely? This is the theme of Tanith Lee’s Vazkor (“Birthgrave”) books, of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Wizard of Earthsea, and of Joe Haldeman’s futuristic espionage novel, All My Sins Remembered, as well as of many more.
Sixth Theme: Who is our brother? How should society be structured? How should we treat our fellow beings? This theme is well-nigh universal, but John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar and its sequel The Sheep Look Up come to mind as excellent examples.
Science fiction is the perfect milieu for new explorations of these ancient philosophical and religious questions, precisely because the canvas is blank when the author begins. There are no givens of time or culture or location; the only givens are those which the author chooses to provide. He or she is free to fabricate worlds which reflect his or her philosophical hangups or sensibilities entirely, without the excess baggage of the familiar univers as we know it. Michael Moorcock, a prolific author whose works are racked with a peculiarly agonized search for the transcendental, has explained his creative urges in this manner: “The landscapes of my stories are metaphysical, not physical. As a faltering athiest with a deep irradicable religious sense (I was brought up on an offbeat brand of Christian mysticism), I tended, particularly in the early stories…, to work out my own problems throug Elric’s adventures…I was writing not particularly well, but from the soul. I wasn’t just telling a story, I was telling my story.”2
Science fiction, then, has the capacity to reflect virtually any concept in traditional religious thought, even though that concept may not be couched in familiar Mormon Sunday School terminolgy. In this context, it is interesting to watch some of the science fiction writers and editors protest that they will have nothing to do with religion. Michael Collings informs us that George Scithers, former editor of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, has been known to ask would-be contributors in a form letter to please omit gods and angels from their stories. And indeed, though they may entertain religious ideas, many science fiction writers tend to be uneasy with God (with a capital G) or other traditional religious names and labels. Our own Orson Scott Card has at one time maintained that “God cannot exist in science fiction,” prompting Bruce Jorgensen’s apt remark, “Of course, it has never been easy to get God into realistic fiction, either.”3 At any rate, it is this sort of uncomfortable interface between traditional religion and science fiction which has let Michael Collings to conclude in his article that the two cannot, indeed, coexist.
However, George Scithers and others notwithstanding, there have been many popular works of science fiction in which God, gods, and angels do exist and do play parts. Poul Anderson constantly makes use of Christian, Nordic, Celtic, Greek and other deity figures, not only in his fantasies but also in his hard-core science fiction (The Avatar, for instance). In Stephen Donaldson’s first Thomas Covenant trilogy (we must confess we haven’t managed to slog our way through the second one), God himself, presumably the traditional Judaeo-Christian God, has a bit part at the beginning and end. An omnipotent God can even be thrown in as a “why not?” element of detail, inessential to the plot, as in Joe Haldeman’s Mindbridge. An anthropologist investigates a planet formerly inhabited by an extinct race who had worshipped a god who dwelt in the center of that planet. She finds “the place where God lived. What she and other investigators had taken as myth and metaphor was actual fact: their God was an immortal, ominipotent creature who had descended from heaven to live under the earth and rule their lives and destinies. It was a representative of a race that had once ruled this corner of the galaxy with benign, but absolute, authority.”4 In C.S. Lewis’ “Space Trilogy,” on the other hand, Gods, heavenly messengers, and archangels are central to the plot and also recognizable as the figures of traditional Christian worship. However, Lewis’ work is an exception. Didactic in nature, it is widely read by Christians who have rarely read other science fiction and only randomly read by mainstream science fiction fans. At any rate, we have been able to make note of some authors who have not been embarrassed to apply frankly religious labels when they write about religious concepts; and some of them continue to be popular with the hard-core science fiction fans.
Since we first wrote this article, we have been happy to note numerous new authors on the scene who have dealt sensitively with religious concepts. Some of these authors have maintained sufficient ambiguity in their author/narrator role that it remains unclear how the teller of the story feels about religion, but the characters are left free to express and feel their religious thoughts without restraint or mockery; many of C.J. Cherryh’s books are like this, as is M.K. Wren’s Phoenix Legacy trilogy. One newish author stands out, though, as having imbued much of his writing with what seems to be such a heartfelt religious sensibility that it is hard not to take it as genuine in the man himself, authorial persona aside. We are talking about Gene Wolfe, particularly his Book of the New Sun tetralogy.
When the fourth volume of Wolfe’s tetralogy hit the bookstores early in 1983, the Washington Post’s reviewer hailed him as a “new Dante,” describing the series this way: “With great urgency, layer upon layer, he has created a world radiant with meaning, a novel that makes sense in the end only if it is read as an attempt to represent the Word of God. How intimate—how dizzyingly remote—how comforting or alienating that Word can be, each reader will of course discover.”5 Wolfe himself, in more modest vein, when asked about the religious tone of the series, answered an interviewer this way: “I put religion into The Book of the New Sun because I tried to put in just about everything I though important in human life. You know the story about Leo Tolstoy the night after he sent the manuscript of War and Peace to his publisher? He is supposed to have sat up in bed, clapped himself on the forehead and said: ‘My God, I forgot the yacht race.’ I don’t have a yacht race in The Book of the New Sun, but I tried to talk about children, war, love and death, God, heaven and hell, and all those things that are really pivotal to the human condition.”6
The Book of the New Sun has many roots. It reminded one of us of the nineteenth-century romance Phantastes, by George MacDonald, that seminal book that C.S. Lewis said “baptized his imagination” as a young man. But it is much more complex and baroque than MacDonald, almost, at first, unbearably so. Not a page goes by without ironic, subtle and almost throwaway references to Kipling, Joyce, Kafka, the Bible, numerous mythic traditions, doubtless numerous authors of whom we are ignorant. No character is given a name but that it has some symbolic significance. No event happens tht is not mirrored elsewhere in the text, that does not become a “type” of something else.
The story is a first-person account of a young man—Severian of Nessus, a journeyman of the “Order of the seekers for truth and Penitence”—who is from so far in the future tht it beggars imagination, and who tells you, at a leisurely pace, all about his education, his path to enlightenment. (We won’t tell you his original occupation, because it [being part of the first book’s title], plus the odious cover art, kept us from buying the books for some time.) There are gems in Severian’s story to be found for anyone who reads it, but there are numerous things which will strike particular sympathy in Mormon readers. There is an evocative description of what lengthy prayer is like; there are visions coming out of bushes in desert places; there is a ritual drama into which our hero falls unwittingly, playing the part of Adam/the Messiah; there are heavenly creatures “full of eyes” such as you might meet in Ezekiel’s visions; there are dramatic healings, and equally dramatic instances where the power of healing is inscrutably withdrawn. Lest you think that the tone sounds too ponderous for words, we hasten to add that all the staples of ordinary adventure fiction are there, too: giants to battle, mountains to climb, a throne to claim, horses (well, sort of) to ride, an heirloom sword, capes to swish and bucklers to swash, alien beings, ships that sail the stars, lurking horrors, quests, friends, lovers.
MORMONISM IN SCIENCE FICTION
Suffice it to say, then, that science fiction authors are predisposed to be interested in religious or philosophical concepts, although their attitudes toward organized religions may vary from hostile to sympathetic. But although science fiction writers are interested in issues that have traditionally been the domain of religion, they aften treat the adherents of particular traditional religions as merely interesting social beings, ignoring their theology and preferring to reinvent a new, secular debate of religious issues.
Michael Collings has examined a number of science fiction novels wiich mention particular religions and which use adherents of these particular religions as characters.7 He found, as we have found in our own observations, that Mormons and Mormonism are mentioned surprisingly often in comparison with other religions. Nevertheless, Collings finds, to his great displeasure, that Mormonism is treated most often as an interesting social phenomenon, not as a source of interesting theology or worthwhile ideas.
Collings notes that when particular religions are named in science fiction, most prominent are Catholicism, Judaism and Mormonism—although we feel he underestimates the attention given to fundamentalist Protestantism. Collings is certainly correct, however, in pointing out that mentions of Mormonism in science fiction are out of proportion to our rather small share of the population.
Collings feels that Mormons are popular as literary “straight men,” mainstream foils for a science fiction dogmatism that wants to take over the turf of philosophical discussion and normative prescription. We demur somewhat from this conclusion. Although we agree that Mormons often play the role of all-American, upright straight men in science fiction and that the Church is sometimes viewed patronizingly as nothing more than an interesting social institution, we also find some interest in Mormon theological innovation.
Mormons as straight men do pop up in a lot of places where, statistically, one might expect Baptists, Methodists, or Episcopalians. As Collings notes, Ian Watson’s novel The Embedding makes numerous comparisons regarding external appearances between two clean-cut young villains and Mormon missionaries; in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Michael Valentine Smith is compared to Joseph Smith because both Smiths have founded bizarre religions which contradict contemporary sexual mores. John Varley’s Wizard contains a random reference to Mormons in which we are coupled with the Catholics and Scientologists as “rich” religions, “rich” meaning well off monetarily.
Two lengthy, primarily negative, references to Mormons are also cited by Collings. The first occurs in Philip José Farmer’s Flesh. Nephi Sarvant, a member of a schismatic Mormon group of the future, is portrayed as a prudish, sex-starved evangelistic fanatic, whose church ironically disappears from the earth while he is still proselytizing for it out in space, and who is finally hanged for rape near the end of the book. In the second example, from Piers Anthony’s Planet of Tarot trilogy, a descendant of John D. Lee is redeemed through a long process in which he becomes convinced that the church of his childhood is based on fasehoods. Neither of these books has exactly made it to the science fiction Hall of Fame (as it were), however, perhaps because they are so polemical. In any case, we don’t think they are substantial enough to keep us Mormons awake at night.
Collings seems to have missed, however, perhaps the most favorable references to Mormons in all of science fiction. In Robert A. Heinlein’s early story, “If This Goes On—” in which a corrupt fundamentalist Protestant prophet rules what used to be the
Michael Collings gets quite miffed because science fiction authors, when they do mention Mormonism, most often focus on externals—polygamy, the Black issue, the young missionaries, strict sex standards, the Church’s wealth—rather than on any deeper theological elements. But since these externals are exactly what popular audiences are going to know about us, we contend that it is hardly surprising that they are emphasized in fiction.
We were not surprised, then, when some time after the first edition of this article, a friend called our attention to Systemic Shock by Dean Ing, a newish science fiction novel of the “after-the-nuclear-holocaust” genre, in which so much of the American continent has been blown away that most of what is left over and still viable ends up in the Intermountain West. Since the Church is the most organized power structure in that area, the Church is basically in charge. As might be expected, in addition to most of the abovenamed externals, Ing also points up a new topic which the Church has recently had controversial press coverage about: the women’s movement and the Church’s attitudes about it—supposedly the attitudes of A.D. 2000 or so, but actually the fairly well-reflected attitudes of 1979 or so. Ing has done a lot of homework on us, and there are some ingenious surprises—a schismatic sect in the desert based on a numerological reading of the Book of Mormon, for instance. We found the book short on metaphysical speculation, but definitely worth checking out.
SCIENCE FICTION BY MORMONS
The culture of Mormonism is rich in possible material to offer its member writers who turn to science fiction. Mormon ideas about the perfection and evolution of humans to godhood, Mormon ideas of agency and responsibility, Mormon views of mankind’s origins, and Mormon experience as a peculiar people in social experiments in early Utah all offer grist for speculative fiction. We are aware, however, of only a handful of Mormons who actually are active in science fiction production.
We are perhaps not the best people to comment on him, since our consumption of network TV is minimal, but the name of Glen A. Larson, who is a Mormon, has been significant in the production of science fiction for television, including Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Centure, and now Knight Rider and other shows more tenuously connected with science fiction. What we have seen of these shows has been fairly innocuous, with occasional rewards: Battlestar Galactica had some in-crowd terms incorporated into its futuristic society (like Council of Elders and Quorum of the Twelve, for instance), and Buck Rogers was occasionally heard to say things like “God made man for a purpose” (or something like that—we are thinking of the episode in which the alien Hawk was subjected to a court trial), which folks don’t say on network TV every day.
You are holding in your hand a result of the second Mormon science fiction production project which comes to mind, namely, Scott S. Smith and Benjamin Urrutia’s ldsf project, which has given a showcase to a number of Mormon writers. Most of the stories in Volume I (we don’t have access to volume II at this moment) were fun to read; most importantly, they exist, and perhaps will inspire future writers.
The third example is, of course, Orson Scott Card, the only Mormon we know of who has broken into the mainstream science fiction market with some success. As of this date, he has published five or so novels in the genre, one short story collection, and some stories in the magazines. (There was a time, a couple of years ago, when almost every copy of OMNI featured a short story by him.) Success is not born in a vacuum, so someone out there, and probably numerous someones, enjoys his work considerably. Our reactions were otherwise—at least as far as Card’s choice of themes and plots went. We found no particular fault in his narrative skill. Try him for yourself.
One of us has heard it yearningly said several times among the Mormon fiction-writing aficionados that what we really need is a Mormon Flannery O’Connor, if we want our people’s hopes and agonies and strivings to be granted an articulate voice in fiction. The science fiction corollary would be, as far as we are concerned: What we really need is a Mormon Gene Wolf.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion we’d like to echo the sentiments of Dr. L. Marlene Payne, who, at the Mormon Letters meeting where the original version of this article was given, spoke feelingly of the spiritual strength she has derived from the ancient myths. Science fiction, which is modern myth, can provide the same. At the very least, it has afforded us a good many hours of harmless entertainment, sometimes mindstretching, sometimes not. At the most, it has offered us some moments of transcendent spiritual joy—as well more concrete food for thought in the transcendental vein. One of us remembers an Institute freshman seminar field trip with Gene England at Stanford to go see the film 2001 and reflect on the possibilities for human progression in the Mormon sense. Times may have changed a bit since then—it was, after all, the eclectic sixties—but we still contend that most of us could use some of that romantic eclecticism. We personally turn to science fiction not only for escape (though that is certainly part of it, we have to admit), but also for inspiration.
NOTES
1. Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber (London: Corgi Books, 1974), pp. 98–99.
2. Michael Moorcock, Sojan (Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1977), p. 135.
3. Dialogue, 13:3 (Autumn 1980), p. 59.
4. Joe Haldeman, Mindbridge (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), pp. 102–103.
5. Joh Clute, The Urth in All Its Glory” (review of The Citadel of the Autarch, Vol. IV of The Book of the New Sun), Washington Post Book World, Vol. XIII, No. 5, Sunday, 30 January 1983, pp. 1–2.
6. Michael Dirda, “Gene Wolfe Talks About The Book of the New Sun,”
7. Michael Collings, “Refracted Visions and Future Worlds”
8. Robert Heinlein, “If This Goes On—”
Sandy Straubhaar’s Favorite Science Fiction and Fantasy Works
1. Lord Dunsany—Many short stories, particularly those found in the collections called The Book of Wonder and The Sword of Welleran.
2. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Heinrich von Ofterdingen (unfinished novel).
3. E.T. Amadeus Hoffman, Der goldene Topf (novella).
4. George MacDonald, Phantastes (novel).
5. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.
6. Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (tetralogy).
7. C.J. Cherryh, The Faded Sun (trilogy) and the Morgain trilogy (Gate of Ivrel, Well of Shiuan, and Fires of Azeroth).
8. Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword.
9.
Michael Moorcock, the Elric novels,
particularly The Weird of the White Wolf
and The
10. Ursula K. LeGuin, the Earthsea trilogy.
11. Tanith Lee, the Karrakaz/Vazkor trilogy (The Birthgrave, Vazkor Son of Vazkor, Quest for the White Witch).
HOW IT HAPPENED
by Isaac Asimov
My brother began to dictate in his best oratorical style, the one which has the tribes hanging on his words.
“In the beginning,” he said, “exactly fifteen point two billion years ago, there was a big bang and the Universe—”
But I had stopped writing. “Fifteen billion years ago?” I said incredulously.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m inspired.”
“I don’t question your inspiration,” I said. (I had better not. He’s three years younger than I am, but I don’t try questioning his inspiration. Neither does anyone else or there’s hell to pay.) “But are you going to tell the story of the creation over a period of fifteen billion years?”
“I have to,” said my brother. “That’s how long it took. I have it all in here,” he tapped his forehead, “and it’s on the very highest authority.”
By now I had put down my stylus. “Do you know the price of papyrus?” I said.
“What?” (He may be inspired but I frequently noticed that the inspiration didn’t include such sordid matters as the price of papyrus.)
I said, “Suppose you describe on million years of events to each roll of papyrus. That means you’ll have to fill fifteen thousand rolls. You’ll have to talk long enough to fill them and you know that you begin to stammer after a while. I’ll have to write enough to fill them and my fingers will fall off. And even if we can afford all that papyrus and you have the voice and I have the strength, who’s going to copy it? We’ve got to have a guarantee of a hundred copies before we can publish and without that where will we get royalties from?”
My brother thought awhile. He said, “You think I ought to cut it down?”
“Way down,” I said, “if you expect to reach the public.”
“How about a hundred years?” he said.
“How about six days?” I said.
He said, horrified, “You can’t squeeze Creation into six days.”
I said, “This is all the papyrus I have. What do you think?”
“Oh, well,” he said, and began to dictate again, “In the beginning— Does it have to be six days, Aaron?”
I said, firmly, “Six days, Moses.”
***picture from p. 20
A VISIT TO THE
BEING A SEQUEL TO MR. CHARLES DICKENS’S
“A CHRISTMAS CAROL”
by Benjamin Urrutia
The day after Christmas, Mr. Ebenezer
Scrooge took Master Timothy Cratchit, son of his new partner in the
Counting
House of Scrooge and Cratchit, to the best physician in
“A Mediterranean cruise would be just the thing, what?”
“Indeed.”
“But Cratchit has not the money for such an enterprise; he has just been made a partner in the firm. Besides, he has other children and a wife also. To take them along would add greatly to the expense; to leave them behind would be painful for all concerned. Only one thing to do: I must take Tiny Tim to the South myself, if Bob grants permission.”
Bob Cratchit granted it, very readily. He
was still in awe of Ebenezer Scrooge (though he need not have been, as
they
were now equals) and accepted the latter’s kind offer with deep
gratitude. And
so, early in January of 1844 AD, the wealthy Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge and
little
Timothy Cratchit departed for the “cloudless climes” spoken of by the
poet.
They visited the sun-drenched vineyards and friendly folk of
From there, they went south to
Tiny Tim throve on the oranges that were
grown around
He had lost the pale grey complexion he
had had in
His leg was as lame as ever. What good is all my money? thought Mr. Scrooge. What good is all the money in the world, if it can not make Timmy’s leg better?
While Ebenezer was engaged in these
melancholy reflections, a man was walking up the beach towards him.
“’Tis that
American, what’s his name?” But much as he thought, Scrooge could not
recall
the name of the fat man from the colonies who had traveled in the same
ship
from
“Ah, Scrooge! I find you at last! We are
organizing an expedition to
“You do not need to shout so loud. And why
should I want to go to
“Why, Mr. Scrooge, you have a fame and
reputation as a man who really knows how to keep Christmas, and
“Yes, but that was one thousand, eight hundred forty-eight years ago by scholarly reckoning, and the town has changed considerably. From what I have read, it is no longer worth visiting.”
“Aw, come on, you can’t believe everything you read!”
Little Tim intervened. “Please, Mr.
Scrooge, Sir, do let us go up to
But on the road to the city of
It was April and near the end of the rainy season. It was not raining then, but the road was very muddy. This made for slow going.
When they arrived at
And it happened. That night an old friend appeared—the Spirit of Christmas past.
“Your prayers have been heard, Ebenezer. Arise and come with me, and bring Tiny Tim with you.”
The boy, awakened by the Spirit’s voice, quickly and wordlessly got dressed.
When the three stepped outside, one
thousand, eight hundred forty-nine years of history had fallen away
from
Besides the animals and the three
visitors, there were three people in the stable: a brown-bearded man, a
beautiful teenage girl, and a baby in her arms. The man did not say a
word
(perhaps his throat was tired from greeting so many visitors, thought
Scrooge),
but he smiled and bowed in greeting. Scrooge did the same in return,
and he
looked in his pockets to see if he had anything he could give as a
suitable
gift. All he had was a gold Sovereign, a coin from the British Empire
stamped
with the profile of the very young Queen
Tiny Tim engaged Mary in conversation, or at least attempted to. Neither spoke the other’s language, but Mary somehow understood Timmy’s wish to hold the baby.
So Tim put down his crutch, embraced the infant and kissed him. “I love you, Lord Jesus. Bless us, everyone!”
The others regarded the two children in
thoughtful silence. “You must come and visit me in
The babe smiled His agreement.
“Ebenezer and Timothy,” said the Spirit, “we must now return.” So the boy returned Jesus to His mother, and Scrooge exchanged more silent bows with Joseph. The Spirit led the way, with Mr. Scrooge and Tiny Tim following, hand in hand.
“Why are you crying, Mr. Scrooge?” asked Timmy, who had inadvertently left his crutch behind (which was no problem, for he needed it not any more).
“What, I crying? Nonsense, my boy. It’s just that the smoke from those primitive lamps got into my eyes, that is all.” Inwardly he thought: Medical science—Bah, humbug!
EDITORIAL AFTERWORD
Swine were raised in Gentile towns on the
borders of the
JERUSALEM
by William Blake
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk
upon
And was the Holy Lamb of God
On
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And
was
Among these dark satanic mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning Gold;
Bring me my arrows of desire.
Bring me my spear—O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!
I will not cease from mental fight;
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till
we have built
In
THE SELFISH GIANT
by Oscar Wilde
Every afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant’s garden.
It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the spring-time broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them. “How happy we are here!” they cried to each other.
One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle. When he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.
“What are you doing here?” he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away.
“My own garden is my own garden,” said the Giant; “anyone can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself.” So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.
TRESPASSERS
WILL BE
PROSECUTED
He was a very selfish Giant.
The poor children had now nowhere to play. They tried to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it. They used to wander round the high walls when their lessons were over, and talk about the beautiful garden inside. “How happy we were there!” they said to each other.
Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the selfish Giant it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. “Spring has forgotten this garden,” they cried, “so we will live here all the year round.” The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney pots down. “This is a delightful spot,” he said, “we must ask the Hail on a visit.” So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in gray, and his breath was like ice.
“I cannot understand why the Spring is so late in coming,” said the Selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold, white garden; “I hope there will be a change in the weather.”
But the Spring never came, nor the Summer. The Autumn gave golden fruit to every garden, but to the giant’s garden she gave none. “He is too selfish,” she said. So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind and the Hail, and the Frost, and the snow danced about through the trees.
One morning the Giant was lying awake in bed when he heard some lovely music. It sounded so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the King’s musicians passing by. It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window, but it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world. Then the Hail stopped dancing over his head, and the North Wind ceased roaring, and a delicious perfume came to him through the open casement. “I believe the Spring has come at last,” said the Giant; and he jumped out of bed and looked out.
What did he see?
He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children’s heads. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing. It was a lovely scene, only in one corner it was still winter. It was the farthest corner of the garden, and in it was standing a little boy. He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly. The poor tree was still covered with frost and snow, and the North Wind was blowing and roaring above it. “Climb up, little boy!” said the Tree, and it bent its branches down as low as it could; but the boy was too tiny.
And the Giant’s heart melted as he looked out. “How selfish I have been!” he said; “now I know why the spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children’s playground for ever and ever.” He was really very sorry for what he had done.
So he crept downstairs and opened the front door quite softly, and went out into the garden. But when the children saw him they were so frightened that they all ran away, and the garden became winter again. Only the little boy did not run, for his eyes were so full of tears that he did not see the Giant coming. And the Giant stole up behind him and took him gently in his hand, and put him up into the tree. And the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms and flung them round the Giant’s neck, and kissed him. And the other children when they saw that the Giant was not wicked any longer, came running back, and with them came the Spring. “It is your garden now, little children,” said the Giant, and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall. And when the people were going to market at twelve o’clock they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.
All day long they played, and in the evening they came to the Giant to bid him good-bye.
“But where is your little companion?” he said: “the boy I put into the tree.” The Giant loved him the best because he had kissed him.
“We don’t know,” answered the children: “he has gone away.”
“You must tell him to be sure and come tomorrow,” said the Giant. But the children said that they did not know where he lived, and had never seen him before; and the Giant felt very sad.
Every afternoon, when school was over, the children came and played with the Giant. But the little boy whom the Giant loved was never seen again. The Giant was very kind to all the children, yet he longed for his first little friend, and often spoke of him. “How I would like to see him!” he used to say.
Years went over, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could not play about any more, so he sat in a huge arm-chair, and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden. “I have many beautiful flowers,” he said; “but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all.”
One winter morning he looked out of his window as he was dressing. He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting.
Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonder and looked and looked. It certainly was a marvelous sight. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.
Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, “Who had dared to wound thee?” For on the palms of the child’s hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.
“Who hath dared to wound thee?” cried the Giant; “tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.”
“Nay!” answered the child: “but these are the wounds of Love.”
“Who art thou?” said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.
And the child smiled on the Giant, and
said to him, “You let me play once in your garden, today you shall come
with me
to my garden, which is
And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.
BLACK WALNUT
by Eugene England
Fine wood that darkens toward the core
And compound leaves that come late
But
push dark and high to ease the
The taste of desert in our bones.
Last spring we built a tall old house
On the site of an older fallen homestead,
But crowding footings and walls under the ancient shade
We cut the roots, dropped huge limbs.
By fall the leaves browned branch by branch,
Hung without dropping in crippled grasps.
I watched the dying through the lowering sun and knew
Those fifty feet of life were mine
To bless. My hands upon the trunk,
I called the Holy Spirit rootward,
Pled for each branch the wine of Christ’s florescent love,
And left the tree to winter rest.
Now come the leaves in early May,
Springing in sharp green strings, the high sun
Proving them against retreating death, and I
Will dress the garden with my life.
POEMS
by Benjamin Urrutia
PROFESSOR TOLKIEN ENTERS HEAVEN
God smiled and said,
“Jack, my son, I put you in charge
Of greeting your friend and showing him around.”
Jack Lewis thanked Him very much
And thought how delighted Tolkien would be
To
see the mallorn-trees abloom in
Heavenly landscapes expanded and improved
According to the books that he had written.
And if his joy in seeing his wife again
Was like Lewis’, when he saw Joy herself again,
No measure should be found for it anywhere.
This
is the secret of Heaven:
Walking together beyond the confines of the Earth,
Seeing once more the beloved face you thought lost
For Ever. Eternal is a mighty word,
It is one of God’s names.
First
you must see her! Then the
And Withywindle. All your rivers are here.
The caverns of Aglarond are as you described them,
Tear-filled wonder for newcomers.
The trees are the best. The white tree of life,
The golden tree of knowledge,
Their places are of honor,
With the ships and stars and stones.
Be welcome!
IN THE BEGINNING
Was the logos,
Even the dia-logos,
Deus et Dea logos,
The conversation of God and Goddess:
“Let us
make man in our
image, in our
likeness: male
and female…”
WHEN THE STARS BEGIN TO FALL
by Will Salmon
And when the stars begin to fall
And the poet, the nation, time, and truth
all join oblivion,
Actor and action, knowledge and knower
are one
And you and I are God,
Time and Space and force are bent together
And all is rapture
THE FRINGE
by Orson Scott Card
LaVon’s book report was drivel, of course. Carpenter knew it would be from the moment he called on the boy. After Carpenter’s warning last week, he knew LaVon would have a book report—LaVon’s father would never let the boy be suspended. But LaVon was too stubborn, too cocky, too much the leader of the other sixth-graders’ constant rebellion against authority to let Carpenter have a complete victory.
“I really, truly loved Little Men,” said LaVon. “It just gave me goose bumps.”
The class laughed. Excellent comic timing, Carpenter said silently. But the only place that comedy is useful here in the New Soil country is with the gypsy pageant wagons. That’s what you’re preparing yourself for, LaVon, a career as a wandering parasite who lives by sucking laughter out of weary farmers.
“Everybody nice in this book has a name that starts with D. Demi is a sweet little boy who never does anything wrong. Daisy is so good that she could have seven children and still be a virgin.”
He was pushing the limits now. A lot of people didn’t like mention of sexual matters in the school, and if some pinheaded child decided to report this, the story could be twisted into something that could be used against Carpenter. Out here near the fringe, people were desperate for entertainment. A crusade to drive out a teacher for corrupting the morals of youth would be more fun than a traveling show, because everybody could feel righteous and safe when he was gone. Carpenter had seen it before, not that he was afraid of it, the way most teachers were. He had a career no matter what. The university would take him back, eagerly; they thought he was crazy to go out and teach in the low schools. I’m safe, absolutely safe, he thought. They can’t wreck my career. And I’m not going to get prissy about a perfectly good word like virgin.
“Dan looks like a big bad boy, but he has a heart of gold, even though he does say real bad words like devil sometimes.” LaVon paused, waiting for Carpenter to react. So Carpenter did not react.
“The saddest thing is poor Nat, the street fiddler’s boy. He tries hard to fit in, but he can never amount to anything in the book, because his name doesn’t start with D.”
The end. LaVon put the single paper on Carpenter’s desk, then went back to his seat. He walked with the careful elegance of a spider, each long leg moving as if it were unconnected to the rest of his body, so that even walking did not disturb the perfect calm. The boy rides on his body the way I ride in my wheelchair, thought Carpenter. Smooth, unmoved by his own motion. But he is graceful and beautiful, fifteen years old and already a master at winning the devotion of the weakhearted children around him. He is the enemy, the torturer, the strong and beautiful man who must confirm his beauty by preying on the weak. I am not as weak as you think.
LaVon’s book report was arrogant, far too short, and flagrantly rebellious. That much was deliberate, calculated to annoy Carpenter. Therefore Carpenter would not show the slightest trace of annoyance. The book report had also been clever, ironic, and funny. The boy, for all his mask of languor and stupidity, had brains. He was better than this farming town; he could do something that mattered in the world besides driving a tractor in endless contour patterns around the fields. But the way he always had the Fisher girl hanging on him, he’d no doubt have a baby and a wife and stay here forever. Become a big shot like his father, maybe, but never leave a mark in the world to show he’d been there. Tragic, stupid waste.
But don’t show the anger. The children will misunderstand, they’ll think I’m angry because of LaVon’s rebelliousness, and it will only make this boy more of a hero in their eyes. Children choose their heroes with unerring stupidity. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, all they know of life is cold and bookless classrooms interrupted now and then by a year or two of wrestling with this stony earth, always hating whatever adult it is who keeps them at their work, always adoring whatever fool gives them the illusion of being free. You children have no practice in surviving among the ruins of your own mistakes. We adults who knew the world before it fell, we feel the weight of the rubble on our backs.
They were waiting for Carpenter’s answer. He reached out to the computer keyboard attached to his wheelchair. His hands struck like paws at the oversized keys. His fingers were too stupid for him to use them individually. They clenched when he tried to work them, tightened into a fist, a little hammer with which to strike, to break, to attack; he could not use them to grasp or even hold. Half the verbs of the world are impossible to me, he thought as he often thought. I learn them the way the blind learn words of seeing—by rote, with no hope of ever knowing truly what they mean.
The speech synthesizer droned out the words he keyed. “Brilliant essay, Mr. Jensen. The irony was powerful, the savagery was refreshing. Unfortunately, it also revealed the poverty of your soul. Alcott’s title was ironic, for she wanted to show that despite their small size, the boys in her book were great-hearted. You, however, despite your large size, are very small of heart indeed.”
LaVon looked at him through heavy-lidded eyes. Hatred? Yes, it was there. Do hate me, child. Loathe me enough to show me that you can do anything I ask you to do. Then I’ll own you, then I can get something decent out of you, and finally give you back to yourself as a human being who is worthy to be alive.
Carpenter pushed outward on both levers,
and his wheelchair backed up. The day was nearly over, and tonight he
knew
something would change, painfully, in the life of the town of
So he pawed at the keys again. “Economics,” said the computer. “Since Mr. Jensen has made an end of literature for the day.” A few more keys, and the lecture began. Carpenter entered all his lectures and stored them in memory, so that he could sit still as ice in his chair, making eye contact with each student in turn, daring them to be inattentive. There were advantages in letting a machine speak for him; he had learned many years ago that it frightened people to have a mechanical voice speak his words while his lips were motionless. It was monstrous, it made him seem dangerous and strange. Which he far preferred to the way he looked: weak as a worm, his skinny, twisted, palsied body rigid in his chair; his body looked strange but pathetic. Only when the synthesizer spoke his acid words did he earn respect from the people who always, always looked downward at him.
“Here in the settlements just behind the fringe,” his voice went, “we do not have the luxury of a free economy. The rains sweep onto this ancient desert and find nothing here but a few plants growing in the sand. Thirty years ago nothing lived here; even the lizards had to stay where there was something for insects to eat, where there was water to drink. Then the fires we lit put a curtain in the sky, and the ice moved south, and the rains that had always passed north of us now raked and scoured the desert. It was opportunity.”
LaVon smirked as Kippie made a great show of dozing off. Carpenter keyed an interruption in the lecture. “Kippie, how well will you sleep if I send you home now for an afternoon nap?”
Kippie sat bold upright, pretending terrible fear. But the pretense was also a pretense; he was afraid, and so to conceal it he pretended to be pretending to be afraid. Very complex, the inner life of children, thought Carpenter.
“Even as the old settlements were slowly
drowned under the rising
“The way I feel about a fringer who succeeds,” said Pope. He was the youngest of the sixth-graders, only thirteen years old, and he sucked up to LaVon disgracefully.
Carpenter punched four codes. “And how is that?” asked Carpenter’s metal voice.
Pope’s courage fled. “Sorry.”
Carpenter did not let go. “What is it you call fringers?” he asked. He looked from one child to the next, and they would not meet his gaze. Except LaVon.
“What do you call them?” he asked again.
“If I say it, I’ll get kicked out of school,” said LaVon. “You want me kicked out of school?”
“You accuse them of fornicating with cattle, yes?”
A few giggles.
“Yes, sir,” said LaVon. “We call them cow-fornicators, sir.”
Carpenter keyed in his response while they
laughed. When the room was silent, he played it back. “The bread you
eat grows
in the soil they created, and the manure of their cattle is the
strength of
your bodies. Without fringers you would be eking out a miserable life
on the
shores of the
Then he resumed his lecture. “After the fringers came your mothers and fathers, planting crops in a scientifically planned order: two rows of apple trees, then six meters of wheat, then six meters of corn, then six meters of cucumbers, and so on; year after year, moving six more meters out, following the fringers, making more land, more food. If you didn’t plant what you were told, and harvest it on the right day, and work shoulder to shoulder in the fields whenever the need came, then the plants would die, the rain would wash them away. What do you think of the farmer who does not do his labor or take his work turn?”
“Scum,” one child said. And another: “He’s a wallow, that’s what he is.”
“If this land is to be truly alive, it must be planted in a careful plan for eighteen years. Only then will your family have the luxury of deciding what crop to plant. Only then will you be able to be lazy if you want to, or work extra hard and profit from it. Then some of you can get rich, and others can become poor. But now, today, we do everything together, equally, and so we share equally in the rewards of our work.”
LaVon murmured something.
“Yes, LaVon?” asked Carpenter. He made the computer speak very loudly. It startled the children.
“Nothing,” said LaVon.
“You said, ‘Except teachers.’”
“What if I did?”
“You are correct,” said Carpenter. “Teachers do not plow and plant in the fields with your parents. Teachers are given much more barren soil to work in, and most of the time the few seeds we plant are washed away with the first spring shower. You are living proof of the futility of our labor. But we try, Mr. Jensen, foolish as the effort is. May we continue?”
LaVon nodded. His face was flushed. Carpenter was satisfied. The boy was not hopeless—he could still feel shame at having attacked a man’s livelihood.
“There are some among us,” said the lecture, “who believe they should benefit more than others from the work of all. These are the ones who steal from the common storehouse and sell the crops that were raised by everyone’s labor. The black market pays high prices for the stolen grain, and the thieves get rich. When they get rich enough, they move away from the fringe, back to the cities of the high valleys. Their wives will wear fine clothing, their sons will have watches, their daughters will own land and marry well. And in the meantime, their friends and neighbors, who trusted them, will have nothing, will stay on the fringe, growing the food that feeds the thieves. Tell me, what do you think of a black marketeer?”
He watched their faces. Yes, they knew. He could see how they glanced surreptitiously at Dick’s new shoes, at Kippie’s wristwatch. At Yutonna’s new city-bought blouse. At LaVon’s jeans. They knew, but out of fear they had said nothing. Or perhaps it wasn’t fear. Perhaps it was the hope that their own fathers would be clever enough to steal from the harvest, so they could move away instead of earning out their eighteen years.
“Some people think these thieves are clever. But I tell you they are exactly like the mobbers of the plains. They are the enemies of civilization.”
“This is civilization?” asked LaVon.
“Yes.” Carpenter keyed an answer. “We live in peace here, and you know that today’s work brings tomorrow’s bread. Out on the prairie they don’t know that. Tomorrow a mobber will be eating their bread, if they haven’t been killed. There’s no trust in the world, except here. And the black marketeers feed on trust. Their neighbors’ trust. When they’ve eaten it all, children, what will you live on then?”
They didn’t understand, of course. When it was story problems about one truck approaching another truck at sixty kleeters and it takes an hour to meet, how far away were they?—the children could handle that, could figure it out laboriously with pencil and paper and prayers and curses. But the questions that mattered sailed past them like little dust devils, noticed but untouched by their feeble, self-centered little minds.
He tormented them with a pop quiz on history and thirty spelling words for their homework, then sent them out the door.
LaVon did not leave. He stood by the door, closed it, spoke. “It was a stupid book,” he said.
Carpenter clicked the keyboard. “That explains why you wrote a stupid book report.”
“It wasn’t stupid. It was funny. I read the damn book, didn’t I?”
“And I gave you a B.”
LaVon was silent a moment, then said, “Do me no favors.”
“I never will.”
“And shut up with that damn machine voice. You can make a voice yourself. My cousin’s got palsy, and she howls at the moon.”
“You may leave now, Mr. Jensen.”
“I’m gonna hear you talk in your natural voice someday, Mr. Machine.”
“You had better go home now, Mr. Jensen.”
LaVon opened the door to leave, then turned abruptly and strode the dozen steps to the head of the class. His legs now were tight and powerful as horses’ legs, and his arms were light and strong. Carpenter watched him and felt the same old fear rise within him. If God was going to let him be born like this, he could at least keep him safe from the torturers.
“What do you want, Mr. Jensen?” But before the computer had finished speaking Carpenter’s words, LaVon reached out and took Carpenter’s wrists, held them tightly. Carpenter did not try to resist; if he did, he might go tight and twist around on the chair like a slug on a hot shovel. That would be more humiliation than he could bear, to have this boy see him writhe. His hands hung limp from LaVon’s powerful fists.
“You just mind your business,” LaVon said. “You only been here two years, you don’t know nothin’, you understand? You don’t see nothin’, you don’t say nothin’, you understand?”
So it wasn’t the book report at all. LaVon had actually understood the lecture about civilization and the black market. And knew that it was LaVon’s own father, more than anyone else in town, who was guilty. Nephi Delos Jensen, big shot foreman of Reefrock Farms. Have the marshals already taken your father? Best get home and see.
“Do you understand me?”
But Carpenter would not speak. Not without his computer. This boy would never hear how Carpenter’s own voice sounded, the whining, baying sound, like a dog trying to curl its tongue into human speech. You’ll never hear my voice, boy.
“Just try to expel me for this, Mr Carpenter. I’ll say it never happened. I’ll say you had it in for me.”
Then he let go of Carpenter’s hands and stalked from the room. Only then did Carpenter’s legs go rigid, lifting him on the chair so that only the computer over his lap kept him from sliding off. His arms twisted, his jaw opened wide. It was what his body did with fear and rage; it was why he did his best never to feel those emotions. Or any others, for that matter. Dispassionate, that’s what he was. He lived the life of the mind, since the life of the body was beyond him. He stretched across his wheelchair like a mocking crucifix, hating his body and pretending that he was merely waiting for it to calm, to relax.
And it did, of course. As soon as he had control of his hands again, he took the computer out of speech mode and called up the data he had sent on to Zarahemla yesterday morning. The crop estimates for three years, and the final weight of harvested wheat and corn, cukes and berries, apples and beans. For the first two years, the estimates were within two percent of the final total. The third year the estimates were higher, but the harvest stayed the same. It was suspicious. Then the Bishop’s accounting records. It was a sick community. When the Bishop was also seduced into this sort of thing, it meant the rottenness touched every corner of village life. Reefrock Farms looked no different from the hundred other villages just this side of the fringe, but it was diseased. Did Kippie know that even his father was in on the black marketeering? If you couldn’t trust the Bishop, who was left?
The words of his own thoughts tasted sour in his mouth. Diseased. They aren’t so sick, Carpenter, he told himself. Civilization has always had its parasites, and survived. but it survived because it rooted them out from time to time, cast them away and cleansed the body. Yet they made heroes out of the thieves and despised those who reported them. There’s no thanks in what I’ve done. It isn’t love I’m earning. It isn’t love I feel. Can I pretend that I’m not just a sick and twisted body taking vengeance on those healthy enough to have families, healthy enough to want to get every possible advantage for them?
He pushed the levers inward, and the chair rolled forward. He skillfully maneuvered between the chairs, but it still took nearly a full minute to get to the door. I’m a snail. A worm living in a metal carapace, a water snail creeping along the edge of the aquarium glass, trying to keep it clean from the filth of the fish. I’m the loathsome one; they’re the golden ones that shine in the sparkling water. They’re the ones whose death is mourned. But without me they’d die. I’m as responsible for their beauty as they are. More, because I work to sustain it, and they simply—are.
It came out this way whenever he tried to
reason out an excuse for his own life. He rolled down the corridor to
the front
door of the school. He knew, intellectually, that his work in crop
rotation and
timing had been the key to opening up the vast New Soil Lands here in
the
eastern
They had built a concrete ramp for his chair after the second time the students knocked over the wooden ramp and forced him to summon help through the computer airlink network. He remembered sitting on the lip of the porch, looking out toward the cabins of the village. If anyone saw him, then they consented to his imprisonment, because they didn’t come to help him. But Carpenter understood. Fear of the strange, the unknown. It wasn’t comfortable for them, to be near Mr. Carpenter with the mechanical voice and the electric rolling chair. He understood, he really did, he was human, too, wasn’t he? He even agreed with them. Pretend Carpenter isn’t there, and maybe he’ll go away.
The helicopter came as he rolled out onto the asphalt of the street. It landed in the circle, between the storehouse and the chapel. Four marshals came out of the gash in its side and spread out through the town.
It happened that Carpenter was rolling in front of Bishop Anderson’s house when the marshal knocked on the door. He hadn’t expected them to make the arrests while he was still going down the street. His first impulse was to speed up, to get away for the arrest. He didn’t want to see. He liked Bishop Anderson. Used to, anyway. He didn’t wish him ill. If the Bishop had kept his hands out of the harvest, if he hadn’t betrayed his trust, he wouldn’t have been afraid to hear the knock on the door and see the badge in the marshal’s hand.
Carpenter could hear Sister Anderson crying as they led her husband away. Was Kippie there, watching? Did he notice Mr. Carpenter passing by on the road? Carpenter knew what it would cost these families. Not just the shame, though it would be intense. Far worse would be the loss of their father for years, the extra labor for the children. To break up a family was a terrible thing to do, for the innocent would pay as great a cost as their guilty father, and it wasn’t fair, for they had done no wrong. But it was the stern necessity, if civilization were to survive.
Carpenter slowed down his wheelchair, forcing himself to hear the weeping from the Bishop’s house, to let them look at him with hatred if they knew what he had done. And they would know. He had specifically refused to be anonymous. If I can inflict stern necessity on them, then I must not run from the consequences of my own actions. I will bear what I must bear, as well—the grief, the resentment, and the rage of the few families I have harmed for the sake of all the rest.
The helicopter had taken off again before Carpenter’s chair took him home. It sputtered overhead and disappeared into the low clouds. Rain again tomorrow, of course. Three days dry, three days wet; it had been the weather pattern all spring. The rain would come pounding tonight. Four hours till dark. Maybe the rain wouldn’t come until dark.
He looked up from his book. He had heard footsteps outside his house. And whispers. He rolled to the window and looked out. The sky was a little darker. The computer said it was 4:30. The wind was coming up. But the sounds he heard hadn’t been the wind. It had been 3:30 when the marshals came. Four-thirty now, and footsteps and whispers outside his house. He felt the stiffening in his arms and legs. Wait, he told himself. There’s nothing to fear. Relax. Quite. Yes. His body eased. His heart pounded, but it was slowing down.
The door crashed open. He was rigid at once. He couldn’t even bring his hands down to touch the levers so he could turn to see who it was. He just spread there helplessly in his chair as the heavy footfalls came closer.
“There he is.” The voice was Kippie’s.
Hands seized his arms, pulled on him; the chair rocked as they tugged him to one side. He could not relax. “Son of a — is stiff as a statue.” Pope’s voice. Get out of here, little boy, said Carpenter, you’re in something too deep for you. But of course they did not hear him, since his fingers couldn’t reach the keyboard where he kept his voice.
“Maybe this is what he does when he isn’t at school. Just sits here and makes statues at the window.” Kippie laughed.
“He’s scared stiff, that’s what he is.”
“Just bring him out, and fast.” LaVon’s voice carried authority.
They tried to lift him out of the chair, but his body was too rigid; they hurt him, thought, trying, for his thighs pressed up against the computer with cruel force, and they wrung at his arms.
“Just carry the whole chair,” said LaVon.
They picked up the chair and pulled him toward the door. His arms smacked against the corners and the doorframe. “It’s like he’s dead or something,” said Kippie. “He don’t say nothin’.”
He was shouting at them in his mind, however. What are you doing here? Getting some sort of vengeance? Do you think punishing me will bring your fathers back, you fools?
They pulled and pushed the chair into the van they had parked in front. The Bishop’s van—Kippie wouldn’t have the use of that much longer. How much of the stolen grain was carried in here?
“He’s going to roll around back here,” said Kippie.
“Tip him over,” said LaVon.
Carpenter felt the chair fly under him; by chance he landed in such a way that his left arm was not caught behind the chair. It would have broken then. As it was, the impact with the floor bent his arm forcibly against the strength of his spasmed muscles; he felt something tear, and his throat made a sound in spite of his effort to bear it silently.
“Did you hear that?” said Pope. “He’s got a voice.”
“Not for much longer,” said LaVon.
For the first time Carpenter realized that it wasn’t just pain that he had to fear. Now, only an hour after their fathers had been taken, long before time could cool their rage, these boys had murder in their hearts.
The road was smooth enough in town, but soon it became rough and painful. From that, Carpenter knew they were headed toward the fringe. He could feel the cold metal of the van’s corrugated floor against his face; the pain in his arm was settling down to a steady throb. Relax, quiet, calm, he told himself. How many times in your life have you wished to die? Death means nothing to you, fool—you decided that years ago—death is nothing but a release from this corpse. So what are you afraid of? Calm, quiet. His arms bent, his legs relaxed.
“He’s getting soft again,” reported Pope. From the front of the van, Kippie guffawed. “Little and squirmy. Mr. Bug. We always call you that, you hear me, Mr. Bug? There was always two of you. Mr. Machine and Mr. Bug. Mr. Machine was mean and tough and smart, but Mr. Bug was weak and squishy and gross, with wiggly legs. Made us want to puke, looking at Mr. Bug.”
I’ve been tormented by master torturers in my childhood, Pope Griffith. You are only a pathetic echo of their talent. Carpenter’s words were silent, until his hands found the keys. His left hand was almost too weak to use, after the fall, so he coded the words clumsily with his right hand alone. “If I disappear the day of your father’s arrest, Mr. Griffith, don’t you think they’ll guess who took me?”
“Keep his hands away from the keys!” shouted LaVon. “Don’t let him touch the computer.”
Almost immediately the van lurched and took a savage bounce as it left the roadway. Now it was clattering over rough, unfinished ground. Carpenter’s head banged against the metal floor, again and again. The pain of it made him go rigid; fortunately, spasms always carried his head upward to the right, so that his rigidity kept him from having his head beaten to unconsciousness.
Soon the bouncing stopped. The engine died. Carpenter could hear the wind whispering over the open desert land. They were beyond the fields and orchards, out past the grassland of the fringe. The van doors opened. LaVon and Kippie reached in and pulled him out, chair and all. They dragged the chair to the top of a wash. There was no water in it yet.
“Let’s just throw him down,” said Kippie. “Break his spastic little neck.” Carpenter had not guessed that anger could burn so hot in these languid, mocking boys.
But LaVon showed no fire. He was cold and smooth as snow. “I don’t want to kill him yet. I want to hear him talk first.”
Carpenter reached out to code an answer. LaVon slapped his hands away, gripped the computer, braced a foot on the wheelchair, and tore the computer off its mounting. He threw it across the arroyo; it smacked against the far side and tumbled down into the dry wash. Probably it wasn’t damaged, but it wasn’t the computer Carpenter was frightened for. Until now Carpenter had been able to cling to a hope that they just meant to frighten him. But it was unthinkable to treat precious electronic equipment that way, not if civilization still had any hold on LaVon.
“With your voice, Mr. Carpenter. Not the machine, your own voice.”
Not for you, Mr. Jensen. I don’t humiliate myself for you.
“Come on,” said Pope. “You know what we said. We just take him down into the wash and leave him there.”
“We’ll send him down the quick way,” said Kippie. He shoved at the wheelchair, teetering it toward the brink.
“We’ll take him down!” shouted Pope. “We aren’t going to kill him! You promised!”
“
“We don’t kill him,” insisted Pope.
“Come on,” said LaVon. “Let’s get him down into the wash.”
Carpenter concentrated on not going rigid as they wrestled the chair down the slope. The walls of the wash weren’t sheer, but they were steep enough that the climb down wasn’t easy. Carpenter tried to concentrate on mathematics problems so he wouldn’t panic and writhe for them again. Finally the chair came to rest at the bottom of the wash.
“You think you can come here and decide who’s good and who’s bad, right?” said LaVon. “You think you can sit on your little throne and decide whose father’s going to jail, is that it?”
Carpenter’s hands rested on the twisted mountings that used to hold his computer. He felt naked, defenseless without his stinging, frightening voice to whip them into line. LaVon was smart to take away his voice. LaVon knew what Carpenter could do with words.
“Everybody does it,” said Kippie. “You’re the only one who doesn’t black the harvest, and that’s only because you can’t.”
“It’s easy to be straight when you can’t get anything on the side, anyway,” said Pope.
Nothing’s easy, Mr. Griffith. Not even virtue.
“My father’s a good man!” shouted Kippie. “He’s the Bishop! And you sent him to jail!”
“If he ain’t shot,” said Pope.
“They don’t shoot you for blacking anymore,” said LaVon. “That was in the old days.”
The old days. Only five years ago. but those were the old days for these children. Children are innocent in the eyes of God, Carpenter reminded himself. He tried to believe that these boys didn’t know what they were doing to him.
Kippie and Pope started up the side of the wash. “Come on,” said Pope. “Come on, LaVon.”
“Minute,” said LaVon. He leaned close to Carpenter and spoke softly, intensely, his breath hot and foul, his spittle like sparks from a cookfire on Carpenter’s face. “Just ask me,” he said. “Just open your mouth and beg me, little man, and I’ll carry you back up to the van. They’ll let you live if I tell them to, you know that.”
He knew it. But he also knew that LaVon would never tell them to spare his life.
“Beg me, Mr. Carpenter. Ask me please to let you live, and you’ll live. Look. I’ll even save your little talkbox for you.” He scooped up the computer from the sandy bottom and heaved it up out of the wash. It sailed over Kippie’s head just as he was emerging from the arroyo.
“What the hell was that, you trying to kill me?”
LaVon whispered again. “You know how many times you made me crawl? And now I gotta crawl forever, my father’s a jailbird thanks to you; I got little brothers and sisters—even if you hate me, what’ve you got against them, huh?”
A drop of rain struck Carpenter in the face. There were a few more drops.
“Feel that?” said LaVon. “The rain in the mountains makes this wash flood every time. You crawl for me, Carpenter, and I’ll take you up.”
Carpenter didn’t feel particularly brave as he kept his mouth shut and made no sound. If he actually believed LaVon might keep his promise, he would swallow his pride and beg. But LaVon was lying. He couldn’t afford to save Carpenter’s life now, even if he wanted to. It had gone too far, the consequences would be too great. Carpenter had to die, accidentally drowned, no witnesses, such a sad thing, such a great man, and no one the wiser about the three boys who carried him to his dying place.
If he begged and whined in his hound voice, his cat voice, his bestial monster voice, then LaVon would smirk at him in triumph and whisper, “Sucker.” Carpenter knew the boy too well. Tomorrow LaVon would have second thoughts, of course, but right now there’d be no softening. He only wanted his triumph to be complete, that’s why he held out a hope. He wanted to watch Carpenter twist like a worm and bay like a hound before he died. It was a victory, then, to keep silence. Let him remember me in his nightmares of guilt, let him remember I had courage enough not to whimper.
LaVon spat at him; the spittle struck him in the chest. “I can’t even get it in your ugly little worm face,” he said. Then he shoved the wheelchair and scrambled up the bank of the wash.
For a moment the chair hung in balance; then it tipped over. This time Carpenter relaxed during the fall and rolled out of the chair without further injury. His back was to the side of the wash they had climbed; he couldn’t see if they were watching him or not. So he held still, except for a slight twitching of his hurt left arm. after a while the van drove away. Only then did he begin to reach out his arms and paw at the sand of the arroyo bottom. His legs were completely useless, dragging behind him. But he was not totally helpless without his chair. He could control his arms, and by reaching them out and then pulling his body onto his elbows, he could make good progress across the sand. How did they think he got from his wheelchair to bed, or to the toilet? Hadn’t they seen him use his hands and arms? Of course they saw, but they assumed that because his arms were weak, they were useless.
Then he got to the arroyo wall and realized that they were useless. As soon as there was any slope to climb, his left arm began to hurt badly. And the bank was steep. Without being able to use his fingers to clutch at one of the sagebrushes or tree starts, there was no hope he could climb out.
The lightning was flashing in the distance, and he could hear the thunder. The rain here was a steady plick plick plick on the sand, a tiny slapping sound on the few leaves. It would already be raining heavily in the mountains. Soon the water would be here.
He dragged himself another meter up the slope despite the pain. The sand scraped his elbows as he dug with them to pull himself along. The rain fell steadily now, many large drops, but still not a downpour. It was little comfort to Carpenter. Water was beginning to dribble down the sides of the wash and form puddles in the streambed.
With bitter humor he imagined himself telling Dean Wintz, “On second thought, I don’t want to go out and teach sixth grade. I’ll just go right on teaching them here, when they come off the farm. Just the few who want to learn something beyond sixth grade, who want a university education. The ones who love books and numbers and languages, the ones who understand civilization and want to keep it alive. Give me the children who want to learn, instead of these poor sandscrapers who go to school only because the law commands that six years out of their first fifteen years have to be spent as captives in the prison of learning.”
Why do the fire-eaters go out searching for the old missile sites and risk their lives disarming them? To preserve civilization. Why do the freedom riders leave their safe homes and go out to bring the frightened, lonely refugees in to the safety of the mountains? To preserve civilization.
And why had Timothy Carpenter informed the marshals about the black marketeering he had discovered in Reefrock Farms? Was it, truly, to preserve civilization?
Yes, he insisted to himself.
The water was flowing now along the bottom of the wash. His feet were near the flow. He painfully pulled himself up another meter. He had to keep his body pointed straight toward the side of the wash, or he would not be able to stop himself from rolling to one side or the other. He found that by kicking his legs in his spastic, uncontrolled fashion, he could root the toes of his shoes into the sand just enough that he could take some pressure off his arms, just for a moment.
No, he told himself. It was not just to preserve civilization. It was because of the swaggering way their children walked, in their stolen clothing, with their full bellies and healthy skin and hair, cocky as only security can make a child feel. Enough and to spare, that’s what they had, while the poor suckers around them worr