Persistence of Vision (2 page)

It was substantial enough that I felt it would be unwise to crawl over it. I had crossed many wire fences in my travels and had not gotten in trouble for it yet, though I had some: talks with some ranchers. Mostly they told me to keep moving, but didn't seem upset about it. This was different. h set out to walk around it. From the lay of the land, I couldn't=' tell how far it might reach, but I had time.

At the top of the next rise I saw that I didn't have far to go.. The wall made a right-angle turn just ahead. I looked over it~ and could see some buildings. They were mostly domes, the: ubiquitous structure thrown up by communes because of the' combination of ease of construction and durability., There: were sheep behind the wall, and a few cows. They grazed on file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt (3 of 24)

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file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt grass so green I wanted to go over and roll in it. The wall enclosed a rectangle of green.

Outside, where I stood, it was: all scrub and sage. These people had access to Rio Grande irrigation water.

I rounded the corner and followed the wall west again. Ì saw a man on horseback about the same time he spotted me. He was south of me, outside the wall, and he turned and rode in my direction.

He was a dark man with thick features, dressed in denim and boots with a gray battered stetson.

Navaho, maybe. L

`

don't know much about Indians, but I'd heard they were out here.

"Hello," I said when he'd stopped. He was looking me over. "Am I on your land?"

"Tribal land," he said. "Yeah, you're on it."

"I didn't see any signs."

He shrugged.

"It's okay, bud. You don't look like you out to rustle cattle." He grinned at me. His teeth were large and stained with tobacco. "You be camping out tonight?"

"Yes. How much farther does the, uh, tribal land go? e' Maybe I'll be out of it before tonight?"

He shook his head gravely. "Nah. You won't be off it,_. tomorrow. 'S all right. You make a fire, you be careful, huh?" He grinned again and started to ride off.

"Hey, what is this place?" I gestured to the wall, and he pulled his horse up and turned around again. It raised a lot .' of dust.

"Why you asking?" He looked a little suspicious.

"I dunno. Just curious. It doesn't look like the other places I've been to. This wall..."

He scowled. "Damn wall." Then he shrugged. I thought that was all he was going to say.

Then he went on.

"These people, we look out for 'em, you hear? Maybe we don't go for what they're doin'.

But they got it rough, you know?" He looked at me, expecting something. I never did get the knack of talking to these laconic Westerners. I always felt that I was making my sentences too long.

They use a shorthand of grunts and shrugs and omitted parts of speech, and I always felt like a dude when I talked to them.

"Do they welcome guests?" I asked. "I thought I might see if I could spend the night."

He shrugged again, and it was a whole different gesture.

"Maybe. They all deaf and blind, you know?" And that was all the conversation he could take for the day. He made a clucking sound and galloped away.

I continued down the wall until I came to a dirt road that wound up the arroyo and entered the wall. There was a wooden gate, but it stood open. I wondered why they took all the trouble with the wall only to leave the gate like that. Then I noticed a circle of narrow-gauge train tracks that came out of the gate, looped around outside it, and rejoined itself. There was a small siding that ran along the outer wall for a few yards.

I stood there a few moments. I don't know what entered into my decision. I think I was a little tired of sleeping out, and I was hungry for a home-cooked meal. The sun was getting closer to the horizon. The land to the west looked like more of the same. If the highway had been visible, I might have headed that way and hitched a ride. But I turned the other way and went through the gate.

I walked down the middle of the tracks. There was a wooden fence on each side of the road, built of horizontal planks, like a corral. Sheep grazed on one side of me. There was a Shetland sheepdog with them, and she raised her ears and followed me with her eyes as I passed, but did not come when I whistled.

It was about half a mile to the cluster of buildings ahead. There were four or five domes made of something translucent, like greenhouses, and several conventional square buildings. There were two windmills turning lazily in the breeze.

There were several banks of solar water heaters. These are flat constructions of glass and wood, held off the ground so: they can tilt to follow the sun. They were almost vertical; now, intercepting the oblique rays of sunset. There were à few trees, what might have been an orchard.

About halfway there I passed under a wooden footbridge. It arched over the road, giving access from the east pasture to the west pasture. I wondered, What was wrong with a simple gate?

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quiet. I stopped and waited.

It was a sort of converted mining engine, the sort that pulls loads of coal up from the bottom of shafts. It was=

battery-powered, and it had gotten quite close before I heard, it. A small man was driving it. He was pulling a car behind -

him and singing as loud as he could with absolutely no sense of pitch. _

He got closer and closer, moving about five miles per hour, one hand held out as if he was signaling a left turn.: Suddenly I realized what was happening, as he was bearing. down on me.

He wasn't going to stop. He was counting fenceposts with his hand. I scrambled up the fence just in time. There wasn't more than six inches of clearance be~: tween the train and the fence on either side. His palm-' touched my leg as I squeezed close to the fence, and he-r stopped abruptly.

He leaped from the car and grabbed me and I thought I, was in trouble. But he looked concerned, not angry, and felt'

me all over, trying to discover if I was hurt. I was embarrassed. -

Not from the examination; because I had been foolish. The=

Indian had said they were all deaf and blind but I guess I hadn't quite believed him. -

He was flooded with relief when I managed to convey to-.= him that I was all right. With eloquent gestures he made me; understand that I was not to stay on the road. He indicated that I should climb over the fence and continue through the: fields. He repeated himself several times to be sure I understood, then held on to me as I climbed over to assure himself that I was out of the way. He reached over the fence ands held my shoulders, smiling at me. He pointed to the road and shook his head, then pointed to the buildings and nodded. He touched my head and smiled when I

nodded. He climbed back onto the engine and started up, all the time nodding and pointing where he wanted me to go. Then he was off again.

I debated what to do. Most of me said to turn around, go back to the wall by way of the pasture and head back into the hills. These people probably wouldn't want me aroand. I doubted that I'd be able to talk to them, and they might even resent me. On the other hand, I was fascinated, as who wouldn't be? I wanted to see how they managed it. I still didn't believe that they were all deaf and blind. It didn't seem possible.

The Sheltie was sniffing at my pants. I looked down at her and she backed away, then daintily approached me as I held out my open hand. She sniffed, then licked me. I patted her on the head, and she hustled back to her sheep.

I turned toward the buildings.

The first order of business was money.

None of the students knew much about it from experience, but the library was full of Braille books. They started reading.

One of the first things that became apparent was that when money was mentioned, lawyers were not far away. The students wrote letters. From the replies, they selected a lawyer and retained him.

They were in a school in Pennsylvania at the time. The original pupils of the special schools, five hundred in number, had been narrowed down to about seventy as people left to live with relatives or found other solutions to their special problems. Of those seventy, some had places to go but didn't want to go there; others had few alternatives. Their parents were either dead or not interested in living with them. So the seventy had been gathered from the schools around the country into this one, while ways to deal with them were worked out. The authorities had plans, but the students beat them to it.

Each of them had been entitled to a guaranteed annual income since 1980. They had been under the care of the government, so they had not received it. They sent their lawyer to court. He came back with a ruling that they could not collect. They appealed, and won. The money was paid retroactively, with interest, and came to a healthy sum. They thanked their lawyer and retained a real estate agent. Meanwhile, they read.

They read about communes in New Mexico, and instruct-. ed their agent to look for something out there. He made a_ deal for a tract to be leased in perpetuity from the Navaho..

nation. They read about the land, found that it would need a lot of water to be productive in the way they wanted it to be.

They divided into groups to research what they would need to be self-sufficient.

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file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt Water could be obtained by tapping into the canals that carried it from the reservoirs on the Rio Grande into the. reclaimed land in the south. Federal money was available for the project through a labyrinthine scheme involving HEW, the Agriculture Department, and the Bureau of Indian

Affairs. They ended up paying little for their pipeline.

The land was arid. It would need fertilizer to be of use inraising sheep without resorting to open range techniques.: The cost of fertilizer could be subsidized through the Rural=

Resettlement Program. After that, planting clover would' enrich the soil with all the nitrates they could want.

There were techniques available to farm ecologically, without worrying about fertilizers or pesticides. Everything was recycled. Essentially, you put sunlight and water into one end and harvested wool, fish, vegetables, apples, honey, and: eggs at the other end. You used nothing but the land, ands replaced even that as you recycled your waste products back into the soil. They were not interested in agribusiness with huge combine harvesters and crop dusters. They didn't even want to turn a profit. They merely wanted sufficiency.

The details multiplied. Their leader, the one who had had= the original idea and the drive to put it into action in the: face of overwhelming obstacles, was a dynamo named JanetReilly.

Knowing nothing about the techniques generals and: executives employ to achieve large objectives, she invented. them herself and adapted them to the peculiar needs and limitations of her group.

She assigned task forces to look into solutions of each aspect of their project: law, science, social planning, design, buying, logistics, construction. At: any one time, she was the only person who knew everything' about what was happening. She kept it all in her head; without notes of any kind.

It was in the area of social planning that she showed: herself to be a visionary and not just a superb organizer. Her' idea was not to make a place where they could lead a life "s that was a sightless, soundless imitation of their unafflicted peers. She wanted a whole new start, a way of living that was by and for the deaf-blind, a way of living that accepted no convention just because that was the way it had always been done. She examined every human cultural institution from marriage to indecent exposure to see how it related to her needs and the needs of her friends. She was aware of the peril of this approach, but was undeterred. Her Social Task Force read about every variant group that had ever tried to make it on its own anywhere, and brought her reports about how and why they had failed or succeeded. She filtered this information through her own experiences to see how it would work for her unusual group with its own set of needs and goals.

The details were endless. They hired an architect to put their ideas into Braille blueprints.

Gradually the plans evolved. They spent more money. The construction began, supervised on the site by their architect, who by now was so fascinated by the scheme that she donated her services. It was an important break, for they needed someone there whom they could trust.

There is only so much that can be accomplished at such a distance.

When things were ready for them to move, they ran into bureaucratic trouble. They had anticipated it, but it was a setback. Social agencies charged with overseeing their welfare doubted the wisdom of the project. When it became apparent that no amount of reasoning was going to stop it, wheels were set in motion that resulted in a restraining order, issued for their own protection, preventing them from leaving the school. They were twenty-one years old by then, all of them, but were judged mentally incompetent to manage their own affairs. A hearing was scheduled.

Luckily, they still had access to their lawyer. He also had become infected with the crazy vision, and put on a great battle for them. He succeeded in getting a ruling concerning the rights of institutionalized persons, later upheld by the Supreme Court, which eventually had severe repercussions in state and county hospitals. Realizing the trouble they were already in regarding the thousands of patients in inadequate facilities across the country, the agencies gave in.

By then, it was the spring of 1988, one year after their target date. Some of their fertilizer had washed away already for lack of erosion-preventing clover. It was getting late to start crops, and they were running short of money. Neverthe-less, they moved to New Mexico and began the backbreaking job of getting everything started.