12 November. It’s a good thing I had my notes together. Less than a day’s warning for the speech (Damon gave me the message, at Grapeseed). The speech was less interesting than the reactions. The old-fashioned communists didn’t like what I had to say about Tsiolkovski. The ones who leaned toward conventional People’s Capitalism were alarmed by the distribution-of-wealth system in Devon’s World, as, I suppose, were any fellow atheists. (Well, it doesn’t really alarm me, but I don’t consider myself anti-clerical. A job is a job.) ¶Will was there, but he didn’t say anything. I wonder about him and James. Who is whose boss, or are they equals? As far as I could tell, they didn’t even say hello. Benny wasn’t there (I talked the speech over with him, but he wasn’t invited) and neither was anybody else I knew but James, Will, and Damon. From the atmosphere of the crowd (it was more like sixty people than forty) I got the impression I was talking to a group of leaders. Love to know more about the structure of the group, and the actual size of it. But when I tried to bring it up last meeting, a real chill dropped.
13 November. A woman in my religion class dropped a note in my lap on the way to her seat. “Take care not to recognize me.” Well, I didn’t. She must have been at the talk last night, but I was nervous in front of a room full of strangers, and rarely looked past the first two rows.
17 November. Will came to my room tonight, and we talked for a couple of hours. He was more relaxed than I have ever seen him. ¶The main topic under discussion was the need for secrecy and his concern that I shouldn’t misinterpret the group’s motivation for it. There are conservative elements in almost every Lobby, even the labor Lobbies, that would love to have a libertarian “whipping boy.” (Which is odd in the perspective of my own reading of American history, which strongly associates libertarianism with conservatism. Terms change as attitudes evolve, I suppose. Jefferson was a libertarian but owned human slaves.) Most disturbing was his assertion that there is some group, small and highly secret, that is practicing “waster politics”—assassinations and pinpoint sabotage—which is being covered up by the government. He couldn’t reveal his source and offered no proof, other than the fact that a lot of politicians have died very young recently. He also pointed out that no competent electrical engineer would accept the authorities’ explanation for last week’s blackout in Boston (that goes along with what I heard at Worlds Club Tuesday). These assassinations have all taken place in Washington, where the government virtually owns all news media. Will believes the group must indeed be part of the government, perhaps a powerful Lobby, perhaps even a clandestine arm of the FBI or CBI. If his aim was to reassure me, he accomplished the opposite. Two nameless groups to be afraid of now, instead of one.
26. A Weighing of Parts
If all poets had Benny’s capacity for enjoying alcohol, literature would be an easier course of study. There wouldn’t be as much of it.
We spent Wednesday afternoon at a wine-and-crackers place near the Russell building, willing to pay a little more to get away from the being-watched feeling we got at the Grapeseed. The wine wasn’t remarkable, and I wasn’t drinking much anyhow, with management seminar in the evening. I had one glass out of the first liter, and Benny finished the rest in less than an hour. Which wasn’t unusual; it took that much to relax him.
He was in one of his odd maniac moods, though, and the wine might as well have been tea, for all its apparent effect. It had been more than a month since the Washington show, and he hadn’t spent half of what his drawings had brought in.He signaled for another liter. “Can you imagine? Any idiot with a drafting board and a steady hand could do that.”
“Come on, Benny; I couldn’t. And I’ve got the steadiest hand at this table. Currently.”
“Nope.” He held a hand out in front of me, palm down. While I was trying to frame something to say, a silver five-buck emerged slowly from between the first two fingers. He rolled it down his knuckles, flipped it and caught it “Want to try?” He held it out to me.
“Seriously, I’ll have to go to class in a while. You don’t want one of these characters to walk you home.”
We were almost two blocks from Broadway, but most of the people were orifice-peddlers of some gender, with their usual retinue. “Might hire one,” he said.
“What?”
“To walk me home, spacer. Some of them’ll do anything for a price.”
“Just keep it down to four liters. It bothers you, doesn’t it?”
I could hear his brain grinding out some non sequitur about the wine or the whores. Instead he nodded and said quietly, “That gallery called today. They want twelve more.”
That was twice as many as he’d sold in October. “That’s wonderful—”
“When I said no, they offered to drop their commission to fifteen percent.”
“You still refused?”
The waiter brought the wine. Benny touched the flask but didn’t pour himself any. “It’s not art.”
That was true, as far as I could tell. Good decoration, though; I had one on my wall. “So what is baby-sitting?”
“Baby-sitting, I can read. Besides, I’m good at it.”
“You’re good at drawing, too. How long would it take you to do a dozen scenes?”
“Two days, maybe three. A week if I was lazy.”
“Three months’ income for a week of work? You’re a lunatic!”
He laughed and poured us each a glass. “I think you’ve just put your finger on it. Must be that cultural perspective James admires so.”
“You can’t get out of it that easily. You’re being a prima donna and you know it. You need the money.”
“No, I don’t. I need the self-respect.”
“What’s so denigrating about using your hands, craftsmanship?”
“Nothing!” He drank half the glass, and refilled it. “I’ll still do some drawings. And I’ll go out on the Square, as usual, and set them up on a rack, maybe do some juggling, sell them to people walking by.”
“For a tenth what the gallery pays.”
“Less than a tenth. But listen… you should’ve been there. They had this poster up, big doleful picture of me, puffed-up biography with all these embarrassing reviews, rising young poet who may become-nobody bought those drawings as art, or even as craft. They bought them as simple curiosities, maybe investments. People who can drop a couple of thousand bucks like a handful of soybeans, just for—”
“That’s just it! They can afford it; it might as well be you who takes it.”
He waggled a finger at me. “That doesn’t sound like a good communist talking.”
“I’m not a communist.”
“Excuse me.” He took a drink. “You live in a state—”
“A World.”
“You live in a world where the state, the world, owns all the capital and gives you room and board, and an allowance, and little trinkets like trips to Earth if it thinks you need them. To me that sounds like ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’”
I tried to keep my voice steady. “I meant communism, Earth-style. Not Marxism. But we don’t have that, either. Marx couldn’t have foreseen the kind of isolated economy you get in a space settlement.”