I ought to add there was a fourth duel in which nobody got killed; my opponent developed a lung infection, then a spinal infection—you understand, we weren’t near civilization then—and the convalescence was such a long, nasty business. I took care of her. Nerve tissue’s hard to regrow. She was paralyzed for a while, you know. Gave me a very salutary scare. So I don’t fight with weapons now, except on my job, of course.
Am I sorry I hurt him?
Not me!
IV
Whileawayans are not nearly as peaceful as they sound.
V
Burned any bras lately har har twinkle twinkle A pretty girl like you doesn’t need to be liberated twinkle har Don’t listen to those hysterical bitches twinkle twinkle twinkle I never take a woman’s advice about two things: love and automobiles twinkle twinkle har May I kiss your little hand twinkle twinkle twinkle. Har. Twinkle.
VI
On Whileaway they have a saying: When the mother and child are separated they both howl, the child because it is separated from the mother, the mother because she has to go back to work. Whileawayans bear their children at about thirty—singletons or twins as the demographic pressures require. These children have as one genotypic parent the biological mother (the “body-mother") while the non-bearing parent contributes the other ovum ("other mother"). Little Whileawayans are to their mothers both sulk and swank, fun and profit, pleasure and contemplation, a show of expensiveness, a slowing-down of life, an opportunity to pursue whatever interests the women have been forced to neglect previously, and the only leisure they have ever had—or will have again until old age. A family of thirty persons may have as many as four mother-and-child pairs in the common nursery at one time. Food, cleanliness, and shelter are not the mother’s business; Whileawayans say with a straight face that she must be free to attend to the child’s “finer spiritual needs.” Then they go off by themselves and roar. The truth is they don’t want to give up the leisure. Eventually we come to a painful scene. At the age of four or five these independent, blooming, pampered, extremely intelligent little girls are torn weeping and arguing from their thirty relatives and sent to the regional school, where they scheme and fight for weeks before giving in; some of them have been known to construct deadfalls or small bombs (having picked this knowledge up from their parents) in order to obliterate their instructors. Children are cared for in groups of five and taught in groups of differing sizes according to the subject under discussion. Their education at this point is heavily practicaclass="underline" how to run machines, how to get along without machines, law, transportation, physical theory, and so on. They learn gymnastics and mechanics. They learn practical medicine.
They learn how to swim and shoot. They continue (by themselves) to dance, to sing, to paint, to play, to do everything their Mommies did. At puberty they are invested with Middle-Dignity and turned loose; children have the right of food and lodging wherever they go, up to the power of the community to support them. They do not go back home.
Some do, of course, but then neither Mother may be there; people are busy; people are traveling; there’s always work, and the big people who were so kind to a four-year-old have little time for an almost-adult. “And everything’s so small,” said one girl.
Some, wild with the desire for exploration, travel all around the world—usually in the company of other children—bands of children going to visit this or that, or bands of children about to reform the power installations, are a common sight on Whileaway.
The more profound abandon all possessions and live off the land just above or below the forty-eighth parallel; they return with animal heads, scars, visions.
Some make a beeline for their callings and spend most of puberty pestering part-time actors, bothering part-time musicians, cajoling part-time scholars.
Fools! (say the older children, who have been through it all) Don’t be in such a hurry. You’ll work soon enough.
At seventeen they achieve Three-Quarters Dignity and are assimilated into the labor force. This is probably the worst time in a Whileawayan’s life. Groups of friends are kept together if the members request it and if it is possible, but otherwise these adolescents go where they’re needed, not where they wish; nor can they join the Geographical Parliament nor the Professional Parliament until they have entered a family and developed that network of informal associations of the like-minded which is Whileaway’s substitute for everything else but family.
They provide human companionship to Whileawayan cows, who pine and die unless spoken to affectionately.
They run routine machinery, dig people out of landslides, oversee food factories (with induction helmets on their heads, their toes controlling the green-peas, their fingers the vats and controls, their back muscles the carrots, and their abdomens the water supply).
They lay pipe (again, by induction).
They fix machinery.
They are not allowed to have anything to do with malfunctions or breakdowns “on foot,” as the Whileawayans say, meaning in one’s own person and with tools in one’s own hands, without the induction helmets that make it possible to operate dozens of waldoes at just about any distance you please. That’s for veterans.
They do not meddle with computers “on foot” nor join with them via induction. That’s for old veterans.
They learn to like a place only to be ordered somewhere else the next day, commandeered to excavate coastline or fertilize fields, kindly treated by the locals (if any) and hideously bored.
It gives them something to look forward to.
At twenty-two they achieve Full Dignity and may either begin to learn the heretofore forbidden jobs or have their learning formally certificated. They are allowed to begin apprenticeships. They may marry into pre-existing families or form their own. Some braid their hair. By now the typical Whileawayan girl is able to do any job on the planet, except for specialties and extremely dangerous work. By twenty-five she has entered a family, thus choosing her geographical home base (Whileawayans travel all the time). Her family probably consists of twenty to thirty other persons, ranging in age from her own to the early fifties. (Families tend to age the way people do; thus new groupings are formed again in old age. Approximately every fourth girl must begin a new or join a nearly-new family.)
Sexual relations—which have begun at puberty—continue both inside the family and outside it, but mostly outside it. Whileawayans have two explanations for this. “Jealousy,” they say for the first explanation, and for the second, “Why not?”
Whileawayan psychology locates the basis of Whileawayan character in the early indulgence, pleasure, and flowering which is drastically curtailed by the separation from the mothers. This (it says) gives Whileawayan life its characteristic independence, its dissatisfaction, its suspicion, and its tendency toward a rather irritable solipsism.
“Without which” (said the same Dunyasha Bernadetteson, q.v.) “we would all become contented slobs, nicht war?"