The dulls could build another house; they built like beavers. There was only one of me in the world.
The earliest memory I have is of some woman, probably the crèchemother, staring at me with an expression of shock and horror. Just that. I’ve tried to remember .what happened directly before or after, but I can’t. Before, there’s nothing but the dark formless shaft of.no-memory that runs back to birth. Afterward, the big calm.
From my fifth year, it must have been, to my fifteenth, everything I can remember floats in a pleasant dim sea. Nothing was terribly important. I was languid and soft; I drifted. Waking merged into sleep.
In my fifteenth year it was the fashion in love-play for the young people to pair off for months or longer. “Loving steady,” we called it. I remember how the older people protested that it was unhealthy; but we were all normal juniors, and nearly as free as adults under the law.
All but me.
The first steady girl I had was named Elen. She had blonde hair, almost white, worn long; her lashes were dark and her eyes pale green. Startling eyes; they didn’t look as if they were looking at you. They looked blind.
Several times she gave me strange, startled glances, something between fright and anger. Once it was because I held her too tightly and hurt her; other times it seemed to be for nothing at all.
In our group a pairing that broke up sooner than four weeks was a little suspect—there must be something wrong with one partner or both, or the pairing would have lasted longer.
Four weeks and a day after Elen and I made our pairing, she told me she was breaking it.
I’d thought I was ready. But I felt the room spin half around me till the wall came against my palm and stopped.
The room had been in use as a hobby chamber; there was a rack of plasticraft knives under my hand. I took one without thinking, and when I saw it I thought, I’ll frighten her.
And I saw the startled, half-angry look in her pale eyes as I went toward her, but this is curious: she wasn’t looking at the knife. She was looking at my face.
The elders found me later with the blood on me, and put me into a locked room. Then it was my turn to be frightened, because I realized for the first time that it was possible for a human being to do what I had done. And if I could do it to Elen, I thought, surely they could do it to me.
But they couldn’t. They set me free; they had to.
And it was then I understood that I was the king of the world.
Something else in me, that had been suppressed and forgotten, rose up with my first blow struck in anger. The sculpture began years afterward, as an accident, but in that moment I was free, and I was an artist.
One winter, in the AC Archives in Denver, I found a storeroom full of old printed books. I spent months there, reading them, because until then I’d thought I had invented sculpture and drawing. The thing I chiefly wanted to know was; why had it stopped? There was no answer in so many words in any of the books. But reading the histories of those times before the Interregnum, I found one thing that might explain it. Whenever there was a long period of peace and plenty anywhere in the ancient world, art grew poor—decoration, genre painting, imitations of imitations. And as for the great artists, they all belonged to violent periods—Praxiteles, da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Renoir, Picasso...
It had been bred out of the race, evidently. I don’t suppose the genetic planners wanted to get rid of it, but they would have shed almost anything to make a homogeneous, rational, sane, and healthy world.
So there was only one man to carve the portrait of the Age of Reason. All right; I would have been content, only...
The sky was turning clear violet when I woke up, and shadow was spilling out from the hedges. I went down the hill until I saw the ghostly blue of photon tubes glowing in a big oblong, just outside the commerce area. I went that way, by habit.
Other people were lining up at the entrance to show their books and be admitted. I brushed by them, seeing the shocked faces and feeling their. bodies flinch away, and went on into the robing chamber.
Straps, aqualungs, masks, and flippers were all for the taking. I stripped, dropping the clothes where I stood, and put the underwater equipment on. I strode out to the poolside, monstrous, like a being from another world. I adjusted the lung and the flippers and slipped into the water.
Underneath, it was all crystal blue, with the forms of swimmers sliding through it like pale angels. Schools of small fish scattered as I went down. My heart was beating with a painful joy.
Down, far down, I saw a girl slowly undulating through the motions of a sinuous underwater dance, writhing around and around a ribbed column of imitation coral. She had a suctiontipped fish lance in her hand, but she was not using it; she was only dancing, all by herself, down at the bottom of the water.
I swam after her. She was young, and delicately made, and when she saw the deliberately clumsy motions I made in imitation of hers, her eyes glinted with amusement behind her mask. She bowed to me in mockery, and slowly glided off with simple, exaggerated movements, like a child’s ballet.
I followed. Around her and around I swam, stiff-legged, first more childlike and awkward than she, then subtly parodying her motions,.then improvising on them until I was dancing an intricate, mocking dance around her.
I saw her eyes widen. She matched her rhythm to mine then, and together, apart, together again we coiled the wake of our dancing. At last, exhausted, we clung together where a bridge of plastic coral arched over us. Her cool body was in the bend of my arm; behind two thicknesses of vitrin—a world away!—her eyes were friendly and kind.
There was a moment when, two strangers, yet one flesh, we felt our souls speak to one another across that abyss of matter. It was a truncated embrace—we could not kiss, we could not speak—but her hands lay confidingly on my shoulders; and her eyes looked into mine.
That moment had to end. She gestured toward the surface and left me. I followed her up. I was feeling drowsy and. almost at peace, after my sickness, I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.
We rose together at the side of the pool. She turned to me, removing her mask, and her smile stopped and melted away. She stared at me with a horrified disgust, wrinkling her nose.
“Pyah!” she said, and turned, awkward in her flippers. Watching her, I saw her fall into the arms of a white-haired man, and heard her hysterical voice tumbling over itself.
“But don’t you remember?” the man’s voice rumbled. “You should know it by heart.” He turned. “Hal, is there a copy in the clubhouse?”
A murmur answered him, and in a few moments a young man came out holding a slender brown pamphlet.
I knew that pamphlet. I could even have told you what page the white-haired man opened it to, what sentences the girl was reading as I watched.
I waited. I don’t know why.
I heard her voice rising: “To think that I let him touch me!” And the white-haired man reassured her, the words rumbling, too low to hear. I saw her back straighten. She looked across at me... only a few yards in that scented, blue-lit air; a world away... and folded up the pamphlet into a hard wad, threw it, and turned on her heel.
The pamphlet landed almost at my feet. I touched it with my toe, and it opened to the page I had been thinking of:
...sedation until his fifteenth year, when for sexual reasons it became no longer practicable. While the advisers and medical staff hesitated, he killed a girl of the group by violence.
And farther down:
The solution finally adopted was threefold.
1. A sanction—the only sanction possible to our humane, permissive society. Excommunication; not to speak to him, touch him willingly, or acknowledge his existence.