First Meetings (6 page)

“Obviously you’ve been given information I don’t have,” said Helena.

“Or figured it out,” said Graff. “Once it was obvious John Paul was never going to Battle School, my mission changed. Now all that matters is we get John Paul out of Poland and into a compliant country, and we keep our word to him, absolutely, to the letter, so he knows our promises will be kept even when we know we’ve been cheated.”

“What’s the point of that?” asked Helena.

“Captain Rudolf, you’re speaking without thinking.”

He was right. So she thought.

“If we have more time before we need our commander,” she said, “then do we have time for him to marry and have children and then the children grow up enough to be the right age?”

“Just barely, yes. We have just barely enough time. If he marries young. If he marries somebody who is very, very brilliant so the gene mix is good.”

“But you aren’t going to try to control
that
, are you?”

“There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.”

“You really
do
think in the long term, don’t you?”

“Think of me as Rumpelstiltskin.”

She laughed. “All right, now I get it. You’re giving him the wish of his heart, today. And then, long after he’s forgotten, you’re going to pop up and ask for his firstborn child.”

Graff clapped an arm across her shoulder and walked with her toward the waiting van. “Only I don’t have some stupid loophole that will let him get out of it if he can guess my name.”

This was not the section of Human Community that John
Paul Wiggin had tried to register for. It wasn’t even his third choice. The university computer had assigned it to him because of some algorithm involving his seniority, how many first-choice classes he had received during his time there, and a slew of other considerations that meant nothing to him except that instead of getting one of the top-notch faculty he had come to this school to study with, he was going to have to suffer through the fumbling of a graduate student who knew little about the subject and less about how to teach it.

Maybe the algorithm’s main criterion was how much he needed the course in order to graduate. They put him here because they knew he couldn’t drop.

So he sat there in his usual front-row seat, looking at the backside of a teacher who looked like she was fifteen and dressed like she had been allowed to play in her mother’s closet. She seemed to have a nice body and was probably trying to hide it behind frumpiness—but the fact that she
knew
she had something worth hiding suggested that she was no scientist. Probably not even a scholar.

I don’t have time to help you work through your self-visualization problems, he said silently to the girl at the chalkboard. Nor to help you get past whatever weird method of teaching you’re going to try out on us. What will
it be? Socratic questioning? Devil’s advocate? Therapy-group “discussion”? Belligerent toughness?

Give me a bored, worn-out wreck of a professor on the verge of retirement over a grad student every time.

Oh well. It was only this semester, next semester, a senior thesis, and then on to a fascinating career in government. Preferably in a position where he could work for the downfall of the Hegemony and the restoration of sovereignty for all nations.

Poland in particular, but he never said that to anyone, never even admitted that he had spent the first six years of his life in Poland. His documents all showed him and his whole family to be natural-born Americans. His parents’ unlosable Polish accents proved that to be a lie, but considering that it was the Hegemony that had moved them to America and given them their false papers, it wasn’t likely anybody was going to press the issue.

So write your diagrams on the board, Little Miss I-Want-to-Grow-Up-to-Be-a-Perfesser. I’ll ace your tests and get my A and you’ll never have a clue that the most arrogant, ambitious, and intelligent student on this campus was in your class.

At least that’s what they told him he was back when they were recruiting him. All except the arrogant part. They didn’t actually
say
that. He just read it in their eyes.

“I wrote all this on the board,” said the grad student with chalk, “because I want you to memorize it and, with any luck, understand it, because it’s the basis of everything else we’ll discuss in this class.”

John Paul had already memorized it, of course, just by
reading it. Because it was stuff he hadn’t seen before in his outside reading, it was obvious her “method” was to try to be “cutting edge,” full of the latest—and most likely to be wrong—research.

She looked right at him. “You seem particularly bored and contemptuous, Mr.…Wiggin, is it? Is that because you already know about the community selection model of evolution?”

Oh, great. She was one of those “teachers” who had to have a goat in the class—someone to torment in order to score points.

“No, ma’am,” said John Paul. “I came here hoping that you’d teach me everything about it.” He kept every trace of sarcasm out of his tone; but of course that made it even more barbed and condescending.

He expected her to show annoyance at him, but instead she merely turned to another student and began a dialogue. So either John Paul had scared her off, or she had been oblivious to his sarcasm and therefore had no idea she had been challenged.

The class wouldn’t even be interesting as a blood sport. Too bad.

“ ‘Human evolution is driven by community needs,’ ” she read from the board. “How is that possible, since genetic information is passed only by and to individuals?”

She was answered by the normal undergraduate silence. Fear of appearing stupid? Fear of seeming to care? Fear of seeming to be a suck-up? Of course, a few of the silent students were honestly stupid or apathetic, but most of them lived fear-driven lives.

Finally a tentative hand went up.

“Do communities, um, influence sexual selection? Like slanting eyes?”

“They do,” said Miss Grad Student, “and the prevalence of the epicanthic fold in East Asia is a good example of that. But ultimately that’s trivial—there is no actual survival value in it. I’m talking about good old rock-solid survival of the fittest. How can that be controlled by the community?”

“Killing people who don’t fit in?” suggested another student.

John Paul slid down in his seat and stared at the ceiling. This far into their education, and they still had no understanding of basic principles.

“Mr. Wiggin seems to be bored with our discussion,” said Miss Grad Student.

John Paul opened his eyes and scanned the board again. Ah, she
had
written her name there. Theresa Brown. “Yes, Ms. Brown, I am,” he said.

“Is this because you know the answer, or because you don’t care?”

“I don’t know the answer,” said John Paul, “but neither does anyone else in the room except you, so until you decide to tell us instead of engaging in this enchanting voyage of discovery in which you let the passengers steer the ship, it’s naptime.”

There were a few gasps and a couple of chuckles.

“So you have no ideas about how the statement on the board might be either true or false?”

“I suppose,” said John Paul, “that the theory you’re suggesting is that because living in communities makes humans far more likely to survive, and to have opportuni
ties to mate, and to bring their children to adulthood, then whatever individual human traits strengthen the community will, in the long run, be the ones most likely to get passed along to each new generation.”

She blinked. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right.” And then she blinked again. Apparently he had interrupted her lesson plan by getting to the answer immediately.

“But what I wonder,” said John Paul, “is this: Since human communities depend on adaptability in order to thrive, then it isn’t just one set of traits that strengthen the community. So community life should promote variety, not a narrow range of traits.”

“That would be true,” said Ms. Brown, “and indeed
is
true in the main, except that there are only a few types of human communities that actually survive long enough to improve the chances of individual survival.”

She walked to the board and wiped out a swath of material that John Paul had just blown through by cutting to the chase. In its place, she wrote two headings: T
RIBAL
and C
IVIL
.

“There are two models that all successful human communities follow,” she said. Then she turned to John Paul. “How would you define a ‘successful’ community, Mr. Wiggin?”

“One that maximized the ability of its members to survive and reproduce,” he said.

“Oh, if only that were true,” she said. “But it’s
not
true. Most human communities demand anti-survival behavior from large numbers of their members. The obvious example would be war, in which members of a community risk their own death—usually at the very age when they are about to begin family life. Many of them die. How can you
possibly pass on the willingness to die before reproduction? Those who have this trait are the least likely to reproduce.”

“But only males,” said John Paul.

“There are women in the military, Mr. Wiggin.”

“In very small numbers,” said John Paul, “because the traits that make good soldiers are far less common in women, and the willingness to go to war is rare in women.”

“Women fight savagely and die willingly to protect their children,” said Ms. Brown.

“Exactly
—their
children.
Not
the community as a whole,” said John Paul. He was making this up as he went along, but it made sense and was interesting—so he was quite willing to let her play the Socratic questioning game.

“And yet women are the ones who form the tightest community bonds,” she said.

“And the most rigid hierarchies,” said John Paul. “But they do it by social sanctions, not by violence.”

“So you’re saying that violence in males but civility in women is promoted by community life.”

“Not violence,” said John Paul. “But the willingness to sacrifice for a cause.”

“In other words,” said Ms. Brown, “men believe the stories their communities tell them. Enough to die and kill. And women don’t?”

“They believe them enough to…” John Paul paused a moment, thinking back on what he knew about learned and unlearned sex differences. “Women have to be willing to raise their sons in a community that might require them to die. So men and women all have to believe the story.”

“And the story they believe,” said Ms. Brown, “is that males are expendable and females are not.”

“To a degree, anyway.”

“And why would this be a useful story for a community to believe?” She directed this question to the class at large.

And the answers came quickly enough, because some of the students, at least, were following the conversation. “Because even if half the men die, all the women will still be able to reproduce.” “Because it provides an outlet for male aggressiveness.” “Because you have to be able to defend the community’s resources.”

John Paul watched as Theresa Brown fielded each response and riffed on it.

“
Do
communities that suffered terrible losses in war in fact abandon monogamy or do a large number of women live their lives without reproducing?” She had the example of France, Germany, and Britain after the bloodletting of World War I.

“Does war come about
because
of male aggressiveness? Or is male aggressiveness a trait that communities have to promote in order to win wars? Is it the community that drives the trait, or the trait that drives the community?” Which John Paul realized was the very crux of the theory she was putting forth—and he rather liked the question.

“And what,” she finally asked, “are the resources a community has to protect?”

Food, they said. Water. Shelter. But these obvious answers did not seem to be what she was looking for. “All these are important, but you’re missing the most important one.”

To his own surprise, John Paul found himself wanting to
come up with the right answer. He had never expected to feel that way in a class taught by a grad student.

What community resource could be more important to the survival of the community than food, water, or shelter?

He raised his hand.

“Mr. Wiggin seems to think he knows.” She looked at him.

“Wombs,” he said.

“As a community resource,” she said.

“As the community,” said John Paul. “Women
are
community.”

She smiled. “
That
is the great secret.”

There were howls of protest from other students. About how men have always run most communities. How women were treated like property.

“
Some
men,” she answered. “
Most
men are treated far more like property than women. Because women are almost never simply thrown away, while men are thrown away by the thousands in time of war.”

“But men still
rule
,” a student protested.

“Yes, they do,” said Ms. Brown. “The handful of alpha males rule, while all the other males become tools. But even the ruling males know that the most vital resource of the community is the women, and any community that is going to survive has to bend all its efforts to one primary task—to promote the ability of women to reproduce and bring their offspring to adulthood.”

“So what about societies that selectively abort or kill off their girl children?” insisted a student.

“Those would be societies that had decided to die, wouldn’t they?” said Ms. Brown.

Consternation. Uproar.

It was an interesting model. Communities that killed off their girls would have fewer girls reach reproductive age. Therefore they would be less successful in maintaining a high population. He raised his hand.

“Enlighten us, Mr. Wiggin,” she said.

“I just have a question,” he said. “Couldn’t there be an advantage in having an excess of males?”

“It must not be an important one,” said Ms. Brown, “because the vast majority of human communities—especially the ones that survive longest—have shown a willingness to throw away males, not females. Besides, killing female babies gives you a higher
proportion
of males, but a lower absolute
number
of males, because there are fewer females to give birth to them.”

“But what about when resources are scarce?” a student asked.

“What about it?” said Ms. Brown.

“I mean, don’t you have to reduce the population to sustainable levels?”

Suddenly the room was very quiet.