Eternal optimism hides behind this dissatisfaction, however; Whileawayans cannot forget that early paradise and every new face, every new day, every smoke, every dance, brings back life’s possibilities. Also sleep and eating, sunrise, weather, the seasons, machinery, gossip, and the eternal temptations of art.
They work too much. They are incredibly tidy.
Yet on the old stone bridge that links New City, South Continent, with Varya’s Little Alley Ho-ho is chiseled:
You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.
If one is lucky, one’s hair turns white early; if—as in old Chinese poetry—one is indulging oneself, one dreams of old age. For in old age the Whileawayan woman—no longer as strong and elastic as the young—has learned to join with calculating machines in the state they say can’t be described but is most like a sneeze that never comes off. It is the old who are given the sedentary jobs, the old who can spend their days mapping, drawing, thinking, writing, collating, composing. In the libraries old hands come out from under the induction helmets and give you the reproductions of the books you want; old feet twinkle below the computer shelves, hanging down like Humpty Dumpty’s; old ladies chuckle eerily while composing The Blasphemous Cantata (a great favorite of Ysaye’s) or mad-moon cityscapes which turn out to be do-able after all; old brains use one part in fifty to run a city (with checkups made by two sulky youngsters) while the other forty-nine parts riot in a freedom they haven’t had since adolescence.
The young are rather priggish about the old on Whileaway. They don’t really approve of them.
Taboos on Whileaway: sexual relations with anybody considerably older or younger than oneself, waste, ignorance, offending others without intending to.
And of course the usual legal checks on murder and theft—both those crimes being actually quite difficult to commit. ("See,” says Chilia, “it’s murder if it’s sneaky or if she doesn’t want to fight. So you yell ‘Olaf!’ and when she turns around, then—”)
No Whileawayan works more than three hours at a time on any one job, except in emergencies.
No Whileawayan marries monogamously. (Some restrict their sexual relations to one other person—at least while that other person is nearby—but there is no legal arrangement.) Whileawayan psychology again refers to the distrust of the mother and the reluctance to form a tie that will engage every level of emotion, all the person, all the time. And the necessity for artificial dissatisfactions.
“Without which” (says Dunyasha Bernadetteson, op. cit.) “we would become so happy we would sit down on our fat, pretty behinds and soon we would start starving, nyet?"
But there is too, under it all, the incredible explosive energy, the gaiety of high intelligence, the obliquities of wit, the cast of mind that makes industrial areas into gardens and ha-has, that supports wells of wilderness where nobody ever lives for long, that strews across a planet sceneries, mountains, glider preserves, culs-de-sac, comic nude statuary, artistic lists of tautologies and circular mathematical proofs (over which aficionados are moved to tears), and the best graffiti in this or any other world.
Whileawayans work all the time. They work. And they work. And they work.
VII
Two ancients on the direct computer line between city and quarry (private persons have to be content with spark-gap radio), fighting at the top of their lungs while five green girls wait nearby, sulky and bored:
I can’t make do with five greenies; I need two on-foot checkers and protective gear for one!
Can’t have.
Incomp-
?
You hear.
Is me!
(affected disdain)
If catastroph—
Won’t!
And so on.
VIII
A troop of little girls contemplating three silver hoops welded to a silver cube are laughing so hard that some have fallen down into the autumn leaves on the plaza and are holding their stomachs. This is not embarrassment or an ignorant reaction to something new; they are genuine connoisseurs who have hiked for three days to see this. Their hip-packs lie around the edge of the plaza, near the fountains. One: How lovely!
IX
Between shifts in the quarry in Newland, Henla Anaisson sings, her only audience her one fellow-worker.
A Belin, run mad and unable to bear the tedious-ness of her work, flees above the forty-eighth parallel, intending to remain there permanently. “You” (says an arrogant note she leaves behind) “do not exist” and although agreeing philosophically with this common view, the S & P for the county follows her—not to return her for rehabilitation, imprisonment, or study. What is there to rehabilitate or study? We’d all do it if we could. And imprisonment is simple cruelty.
You guessed it.
XI
“If not me or mine,” (wrote Dunyasha Bernadetteson in 368 A.C.) “O.K.
“If me or mine—alas.
“If us and ours—watch out!”
XII
Whileaway is engaged in the reorganization of industry consequent to the discovery of the induction principle.
The Whileawayan work-week is sixteen hours.
PART FOUR
I
After six months of living with me in the hotel suite, Janet Evason expressed the desire to move in with a typical family. I heard her singing in the bathroom:
I know
That my
Rede-emer
Liveth
And She
Shall stand
Upon the latter da-ay (ruffle)
On Earth.
“Janet?” She sang again (not badly) the second variation on the lines, in which the soprano begins to decorate the tune:
I know (up)
Tha-at my (ruffle)
Re-e-edeemer (fiddle)
Liveth
And She
Shall stand (convex)
And She
Shall stand (concave)
“Janet, he’s a Man!” I yelled. She went into the third variation, where the melody liquefies itself into its own adornments, very nice and quite improper:
I know (up)
That my redee (a high point, this one)
mer
Li-i-veth (up up up)
And She
Shall stand (hopefully)
And She shall stand (higher)
Upon the la-a-a-a-atter da-a-a-y
(ruffle fiddle drip)
O-on Earth (settling)
“JANET!” But of course she doesn’t listen.
II
Whileawayans like big asses, so I am glad to report there was nothing of that kind in the family she moved in with. Father, mother, teenage daughter, and family dog were all delighted to be famous. Daughter was an honor student in the local high school. When Janet got settled I drifted into the attic; my spirit seized possession of the old four-poster bed stored next to the chimney, near the fur coats and the shopping bag full of dolls; and slowly, slowly, I infected the whole house.
III
Laura Rose Wilding of Anytown, U.S.A.
She has a black poodle who whines under the trees in the back yard and bares his teeth as he rolls over and over in the dead leaves. She’s reading the Christian Existentialists for a course in school. She crosses the October weather, glowing with health, to shake hands clumsily with Miss Evason. She’s pathologically shy. She puts one hand in the pocket of her jeans, luminously, the way well-beloved or much-studied people do, tugging at the zipper of her man’s leather jacket with the other hand. She has short sandy hair and freckles. Says over and over to herself Non Sum, Non Sum, which means either I don’t exist or I’m not that , according to how you feel it; this is what Martin Luther is supposed to have said during his fit in the monastery choir. “Can I go now?”