Why couldn’t that person be her?
Why not?
Even when there’s no hope?
That was the beautiful thing about it. You didn’t need hope. Only life.
She sat cross-legged on a grassy hillside, in the bright sunshine. A warm breeze tugged rivulets of long, black hair; the silk of her Qi Pao billowed and flowed in the same river. Her hands folded across her lap. She smiled easily; but her face was deadly somber and serious, the face of classrooms and earnest lessons.
“I want to thank you for giving me the time to speak with you on a very important issue. But first, let me tell you who I am: I am an elementary school teacher. Excuse me, I was an elementary school teacher. I taught for seven years on the Lagrange colony; what you would call the grange. But for the last few months I have been Earth-side, where I was born and raised.”
Lisa shifted uncertainly in the grass, hoping that her words would sound as good in her mouth as they had in her head. “By now, many of you have noticed that I am of Chinese extraction. But others, perhaps most of you, haven’t noticed it, even though I have emphasized the fact by wearing what was once known as traditional costume. Indeed, you probably find it incomprehensible that anyone would notice something like that; there is nothing remarkable, and certainly nothing frightening about it, you would say. We’re all human beings, after all.
“But there was a time, not too long ago, when you would have noticed it instantly; and when many would have been disturbed, or even frightened or angered by it. To a number of you, I would have been seen as a threat: a threat to your prosperity, to your security, perhaps even to your neighborhoods or families. Or even to your own lives.
“If such a reaction seems barbaric to us now, that is because our predecessors worked hard to overcome it. They literally rebuilt civilization, to where consideration of anything other than an individual’s abilities and character was repugnant. We’re all one big, happy human family, thanks to them. And the result has been a Pax Humana, that first spread across the face of the Earth, and now is reaching to the edges of the Solar System.
“Or is it? The recent strike by shimp miners in the asteroid belt, and the reaction of our UN to it, has clouded this bright future. And there have been other events connected to these developments: events not as dramatic, but perhaps even more indicative of the dark side of our shining civilization. Events that show how many of the old evils are still with us, and still hungry to grow back into the horrors they once were.”
Lisa shifted again, and licked her lips nervously. Reed Ready was out there, somewhere, watching and listening. He could denounce her afterwards, twist all her words and make the millions who’d heard them forget what she really said.
But he couldn’t steal her words from her. She took a deep breath, let it swirl around in her lungs and recharge her blood, then let it out gradually. She continued, “But first, I want to share something else with you. I said I taught on the Lagrange colony for seven years, up until recently. In fact, for the last year, I held a highly prestigious position in research. I am here today because I was dismissed from that position. When I say here today, I literally mean that: where I am at this moment, speaking to you. Because I must share with you the reasons for my dismissal; the events which led to it.
“The reasons involve the strike, and how I came to hold such a position in the first place,” she told them. “But, more than anything else, it involves a young girl, a child. A person who paid the ultimate price because she was too innocent to know the rules.
“Her name, if it matters, was Allison. She was a bright child, not the brightest I’ve known, and not in all areas—her language skills were a year behind those of her classmates—but she had unusual facility in mathematics and the sciences. I should add that there was a time when such abilities in a girl were frowned on, or worse, cause to regard her as something evil. But we live in enlightened times; no one is treated as something depraved or foolish merely on account of sex—that is primitivist thinking, straight out of the medieval age.
“Or is it? Every year there are colony-wide academic competitions among the schools, to see who is the best and brightest in the different fields. It’s meant to be a friendly competition; none of the children are forced to enter, and no stigma is attached either to those who decline or who end up low in the final standings. The sole purpose is to encourage academic excellence.
“Of course, that is an idealistic description. People being people, in reality the competitions are not as noble as we might like. Where there are winners there must be losers: those who know they didn’t measure up, who must be content with the left-handed compliment of having tried their best. Much as we would like to deny this unpleasant aspect of competition it is always there, bubbling beneath the surface in hot, if carefully hidden, resentment.”
Not bad. Maybe I should go into this trade full time, she thought. Instinctively, she stood up, turned to the side and faced the sky. “That resentment is always greater when the winner is different in some basic way. When she is like us, we can identify with her and her triumph; we can say ‘we won’and feel that superiority that is always the real reward of victory. But let her be different enough, and we have nothing. We will simply have to take our back seats. We will have to sit on our resentment, and let it smolder painfully, with too much fuel to go out completely but too little air to flame up and satisfy itself.
“But what if there are only a few of her, or even only one, but many of us? Then we might decide that something is fundamentally wrong here. And what if, in addition, we have always taken her kind to be inferior to us? Then the idea that this person has committed some kind of crime is even stronger; after all, she has disturbed the natural order of the Universe—Things As They Ought To Be. She becomes an invader. An alien who will destroy everything if we don’t cast her out. Or destroy her first.”
She struggled to contain her tears, but they rimmed up and eased out onto her face, blurring her makeup. “The child I am speaking of—Allison—was destroyed in just this manner. Destroyed because she scored highly in a field where her kind was not even supposed to walk.
“She was destroyed by the other children. Of course, those children didn’t know what they were doing; they didn’t realize what a hard object can do when brought down on a skull with all of even a human child’s strength. All they knew was that they hated her, too much for the why—even if they had some dim awareness of what I’ve described—to matter. They hated Allison for stealing what they regarded as theirs by right. Hated her because she didn’t know enough to play by their rules, or even what those rules were.” Because you wouldn’t teach her those rules, a voice screamed at her from inside. “They hated her because she wasn’t human in their eyes. She was a pan. A shimp. That was enough.”
She allowed her words to sink in. “That is why I am here today. Nobody on the colony wanted to accept the real reasons for Allison’s destruction. How could they? They were the cream of humanity, the elite of the elite; it was impossible that they were guilty of such things. Groundhogs, perhaps; but not them—not the heirs of humanity’s bright future. They were too far beyond such Neanderthal mentality.
“So I returned to the world of my birth. I tried to put Allison behind me. To forget. A cowardly act, I suppose, but—
“But you cannot escape evil. Evil is never dead, and it is always hungry. Feed it, even without meaning to or even realizing that you are, and it will become a monster again. I came here for sanctuary, but what I found instead was the same monster, albeit in a different form, feeding away right under the noses of the people.