“Denise Thang.”
“Denise? Are you French?”
“Somewhere way back there was a Frenchman who married into my family. Or perhaps didn’t marry.” She shrugged. “Anyway it is the custom to name the children with French names. But I am Vietnamese.” She said it with a note of pride. “What’s your name?” she added.
I told her. After that we walked for a little while in silence. I was glad to have Denise’s company, her friendliness. She seemed content to stroll with me as I appraised this future city of Saigon in which I’d landed.
My appraisal didn’t say much for the future. Rubble was everywhere. Fragments of bombs and shells littered the streets. We walked through a heavy smog of dust, which seemed to both rise from under our feet like some damp miasma and to descend upon us from the sky as if its grayness were a part-of the very sunbeams. There was a strange odor which seemed ever present; it was a while before I identified it as the aroma of decaying flesh.
In the distance, viewed through the film of smog, I could see trees, the lush vegetation of the tropical jungle. At the edge was visible an occasional rice paddy swimming in water, patches of muck, which I knew must be fetid. Off to one side I made out tail, modern apartment buildings and the outlines of unlit neon signs glinting in the sunlight, shimmering in the swirls of smog. The whole combined to form a picture of future glitter sinking into an age-old and inevitable bog.
Saigon!
Closer at hand, the people we passed seemed mostly to be women. There was an occasional male toddler, or a very old man dragging himself along as if plodding toward the graveyard, but nowhere did I see any young men. I commented on this to Denise.
“They’re all in the jungle.” She shrugged.
“In the jungle?”
“Yes. Most of them hiding from the draft. Some of them fighting.”
“For us?” I wondered.
“For the Americans, yes. And for the Viet Cong. And sometimes for both. Because sometimes the only way to stay alive is to switch sides at the right time.”
“Draft dodgers and traitors,” I mused. “It doesn’t say much for Vietnamese patriotism.”
“Patriotism is a luxury most of us Vietnamese can’t afford,” she told me drily. “Only the Americans are rich enough to afford Vietnamese patriotism.”
“So we die fighting for your country!” Back where I’d come from, I’d never been a hawk. Nevertheless I didn’t like to think that American boys were dying as patsies.
“It’s very sad.” Denise nodded gently. “It would be good if you would stop dying. It would be good if you would stop killing too. But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s always been. How can we make you understand that a Vietnamese has the right to survive? It’s your right too, but you don’t choose to exercise it. That is sad. We do exercise it. Perhaps that is sad, but not quite so sad. Not quite, because that is survival.”
“Peace!” I held up my hand to stop her tirade. She was becoming quite excited and I wanted to calm her.
“Exactly!” Denise fell silent again. Moodily, she continued to walk alongside me.
We’d walked some distance now and I’d noticed one sight that seemed to recur every block or two. It consisted of a large cauldron with a fire beneath it. In each case there was a woman standing over the cauldron and stirring the contents. I assumed that the contents must be some sort of food and that the cauldrons constituted some sort of street corner soup kitchens for the benefit of the population. I couldn’t have been more wrong. But it was awhile before I discovered the nature of my error.
Meanwhile, Denise Thang led me in to a hole in the ground. I don’t know how else to describe it. From the street it looked like just another pile of debris. Inside it turned out to be a sort of cellar apartment, modestly furnished, not too uncomfortable except for the dankness and lack of natural light. This was Denise’s home. She told me to make myself comfortable, lit a couple of oil lamps and put up some coffee. Drinking it, we talked at length.
From this conversation I got a picture of the period. The year, according to Denise, was One Fourteen. I spent a lot of time trying to get that straight, but I wasn’t too successful. Evidently there had been some sort of holocaust a hundred and fourteen years ago-probably nuclear—and the period since was dated from then. There was no way I could relate it to 196725 . It was at least a hundred and fourteen years from my time; it might have been la few hundred years; it might have been a few thousand.
I tried to pinpoint it in terms of American involvement in Vietnam. No soap. “The Americans have always been here,” Denise told me. “The Americans will always be here. Here is their testing ground, their training field, for the other wars.”
“The other wars?”
“There are always other wars. Big ones. Some not so big. They don’t concern us here in Vietnam. Our war is all our life. Other places they have peace sometimes, but not here.”
Dismal! I dropped it and turned the conversation in other directions. As delicately as I knew how, I asked her why the women had been so intrigued by my sex organs before. Her answer sent chills up my spine.
The wars, it seemed had not solved the overpopulation problem in the world. During however long had elapsed since the 1960s, the world population had doubled itself -— not just once, but from what I could gather, many times. The problem had finally become so acute that it had become necessary to take radical action on a worldwide scale.
Birth control hadn’t worked. The nonwhite races had objected to its being applied to them as a means of perpetuating their subjugation. Caucasians had become fearful that if they practiced it while others didn’t, the white race would soon become extinct. The impasse persisted and the earth took on the aspects of one gigantic rush-hour traffic jam. The governments of the world were forced to turn to science for a solution.
Science combined two practices already known and extended them to their ultimate implications. The first of these was the policy of sterilization. The second was artificial insemination.
The scientists reasoned that if natural birth procedures could be curtailed and artificial ones substituted, population levels might be stabilized and maintained. From this had evolved the policy in effect in the time period in which I now found myself. It was simple. All males were castrated at birth. Females obtained permission from the government to “make” babies. These infants were created bio-chemically. Not only was sex a thing of the past, but so was pregnancy. There was no gestation period for infants and they were not carried in the womb of the mother. Babies were created artificially, but—motherhood still being sacred—-the bio-chemical process was carried out by individual women rather than on an assembly-line basis. This was what the women stirring the cauldrons on the street corners had been doing-—making babies!
The castration of the males had a useful psychological side effect from the point of view of the authorities. Deprived of sex, or even any desire for it, men became more pliable cogs in the military machine. War had become an emotional outlet on a scale never before known. Most men were content with the replacement of sex by violence. The men of Vietnam were an exception. Regardless of religion, culturally they were Zen-oriented and content with the contemplation of violence as opposed to participation in which one might suffer pain, or death. In a strange way, these Vietnamese of the future had reached practicality through mysticism while the rest of the world was being tactically practical and skipping along the edge of brinksmanship towards destruction.
All this I learned from my conversation with Denise. It was night when we finished talking. She suggested taking a walk over to the American Quarter of Saigon. Curious, I readily assented.