“You say that like it was bad. Isn’t thin beautiful to you? I’ve been dumpy for three years. Not that I don’t look as lousy as I feel in that bughouse.”
“Jackrabbit is thin beautiful. Bee is big beautiful. Dawn is small beautiful. Tilia is creamy orange beautiful.” Luciente nodded at her cat, who stood up expectantly. “Tilia told me you’re stupid, and I explained that people of your time did not talk with cats.”
She remembered the orange cat stalking away. It stared at her boldly now, with malice she felt. “People of my time talk to cats, dogs, hamsters. To parakeets and goldfish. Lonely people talk to the wall. Listen, the bughouse is full of women who started talking to the Blessed Virgin Mary because their old man wouldn’t listen.”
“I mean in sign languages. For instance, Tilia and I talk sign language based on cat signs but modified—because many things must be said between cat and human different from what is said cat to cat.”
“Oh? What do you talk about? The taste of raw mouse?”
“Much is simply expressing affection, anger, disappointment. I want, Tilia wants. Fish, milk, yogurt, to go out, peace and quiet, catch the mouse, don’t touch that bird. Groom me. Let me work. Tilia does have a strong aesthetic sense and comments freely on flimsies and even on costumes. The last coverlet for the bed Tilia loathed and buried so persistently—that shit-covering gesture—that I had to trade it for another.”
“Could you speak to her now? Ask her if she believes in God or what she thinks about public nudity.”
“You don’t believe me!”
“Either you’re putting me on or you’re crazier than I am.”
“I’ll teach you how to meet a cat. Cats are formal about introductions. I got flack last time. Look Tilia can express feeling puffed. If Tilia takes a flying leap onto my chest at first dawn from the top of the wardrobe, I get a clear notion that cat is dissatisfied with my conduct.” Luciente squinted, held her eyes shut for a few seconds, opened them again, squinted again, repeating the whole sequence, and then looked pointedly away. “This is how you meet a cat if your intentions are friendly. If you mean harm—for instance, you are approaching a cat standing over the body of a local chickadee—then you stare hard, you glare.”
Connie sank on the broad bed, giggling. “You look … ridiculous.”
“To a cat I presume I always look ridiculous. Awkward creatures by comparison, waddling around in clothes.
Come!
Talking is ridiculous to animals who commune through scents, colors, body language—all our minute posturing with the tongue and lips and teeth.” Luciente made a wide-eyed pleading face. “Come on, just do it once and we can get on with the day’s exploring. Just do it and get it over with.”
“You want me to make faces at your cat?”
“Just be introduced. Tilia thinks you’re hostile.”
“All my life I been pushed around by my father, by my brother Luis, by schools, by bosses, by cops, by doctors and
lawyers and caseworkers and pimps and landlords. By everybody who could push. I am damned if I am going to be hassled by a cat.”
Luciente looked back levelly with her eyes like black beans. “Person must not do what person cannot do. Let’s go. No,” she said to Tilia and reached out Tilia stalked to the door, raised a paw, and slashed at it. Luciente let her out and on the far side of the screen door she paused and buried the house and its inhabitants with that gesture of disdain.
They followed the cat out. The rose on the hut was in full bloom, its scent spicing the air. The roses were luscious semi-double white cups marked on the skirts with dark crimson. “Your rose is beautiful.”
“Let me cut you one.” Luciente used a clippers from a knife with many parts. “For your hair.”
“My hair. I’m embarrassed. I hate it this way.”
“Why not change it, then?”
“I used to dye it along the part where it turned white. But in the hospital I can’t fix it.”
“When we wish to change our hair color, we change the proteins. It doesn’t grow out as it was.” Luciente was urging her along, arm around her shoulders. In a summer sleeveless shirt of a muted gold, her body was obviously female. Connie smiled to herself. Perhaps it was the lighter clothing, perhaps it was a matter of expectations—anyhow, Luciente now looked like a woman. Luciente’s face and voice and body now seemed female if not at all feminine; too confident, too unself-conscious, too aggressive and sure and graceful in the wrong kind of totally coordinated way to be a woman: yet a woman.
“I wish I could help you with your hair,” Luciente said. “Myself, I never alter my appearance except for dressing up at festivals. But many of us play with appearance.”
“Tell me about this making faces at animals. You do it with puppy dogs and mice and termites too?”
“We have a holiday, Washoe Day, when we celebrate our new community, named for a heroine of your time—a chimpanzee who was the first animal to learn to sign between species. Now we have rudimentary sign languages with many mammals. Some, like apes, use sign language with each other.
Most, like cats and dogs, have other ways of communing and only sign to us.”
“Tell me—what do you say to a cow you’re about to eat?”
“Exactly. It’s changed our diet. So has the decision to feed everyone well. For each region we try to be ownfed and until the former colonies are equal in production, mammal meat is inefficient use of grains. Some regions raise cattle on grasses—”
“You never eat meat? It must be like living on welfare.”
“We do on holidays, and we have a lot of them. As a way of culling the herd. We say what we’re doing. They know it. In the same spirit, in November we hunt for a short period. That is, our village does. We’re Wamponaug Indians. We need some experience with free-living animals as prey and predator, to body the past of our tribe fully … . Though I confess I never hunt. Some of us would just as soon lapse that custom, but we lack the votes to do it.”
“You’re what? Blond Indians? Indians with red beards?”
“Barbarossa dyes per beard, in truth. Isn’t it pretty? It was brown before.”
“You! You look like me. My ancestors were Mayans, but they were hardly Wamponaugs! That’s no more alike than … Italians and Swedes!”
“We’re all a mixed bag of genes,” Luciente said. “Now I know where we’ll go.” She diddled with her kenner. “G’light, it’s me, Luciente. Can you meet us at the brooder? I’m with Connie, the person from the past. Get White Oak to fill for you. We’ll work running hard later.” She turned back to Connie. “I asked Bee to meet us at the brooder. That’s the yellow just-grew on the east. So much to glide over!” Luciente broke into a jog, saw that she was leaving Connie behind, and waited. “You set the pace.”
“Bee is your boyfriend just out of the army? Was he drafted?”
“Grafted? Everybody takes turns. We can all use arms, we’re all trained in fighting hand to hand, we can all manage facets of more complicated operations. I can shoot a jizer.”
“Women too? Did you have to go?”
“Fasure I’ve gone. Twice, Once at seventeen and once when we had a big mobe. I fought both times.”
“Fought? And you won’t go hunting?”
Luciente paused, her eyes clouding over. “A contradict. I’ve gone through a worming on it, yet it stays. Grasp, you never know whether you’re fighting people or machines—they use mostly robots or cybernauts. You never know … . Still I’d go again. At some point after naming, you decide you’re ready to go.”
“Ha! I bet lots of people decide never to go. Or does someone decide for you?”
“How could they? It’s like being a mother. Some never mother, some never go to defend.” Luciente frowned, tugging her hand through her thick black hair. “On defense your life can hang on somebody. If person didn’t want to be there, person might be careless and you might suffer. If person didn’t want to mother and you were a baby, you might not be loved enough to grow up loving and strong. Person must not do what person cannot do.”
“Ever hear of being lazy? Suppose I just don’t want to get up in the morning.”
“Then I must do your work on top of my own if I’m in your base. Or in your family, I must do your defense or your child-care. I’ll come to mind that. Who wants to be resented? Such people are asked to leave and they may wander from village to village sourer and more self-pitying as they go. We sadden at it.” Luciente shrugged. “Sometimes a healer like my old friend Diana can help. Diana the rose. A healer can go back with you and help you grow again. It’s going down and then climbing a hard path. But many heal well. Like you, Diana catches.”
The yellow building was odd, like a lemon mushroom pushing out of the ground. Decorated with sculpted tree shapes, it was windowless and faintly hummed. She realized that except for the creaking of windmills, this was the first sound of machinery she had heard here. Indeed, the door sensed them and opened, admitting them to an antechamber, then sliding shut to trap them between inner and outer doors in a blue light.
“What is all this?” She shifted nervously.
“Disinfecting. This is the brooder, where our genetic material is stored. Where the embryos grow.”
The inner doors zipped open, but into space that looked more like a big aquarium than a lab. The floor was carpeted in
a blue print and music was playing, strange to her ears but not unpleasant. A big black man leaning comfortably on a tank painted over with eels and water lilies waved to them. “I’m Bee. Be guest! Be guest to what I comprend was a nightmare of your age.”
“Bottle babies!”
“No bottles involved. But fasure we’re all born from here.”
“And are you a Wamponaug Indian too?”
Bee smiled. He was a big-boned, well-muscled man with some fat around his midriff, and he moved more slowly than Luciente, with the majesty and calm of a big ship. He steered placidly among the strange apparatus, the tanks and machines and closed compartments, something that beat slowly against the wall like a great heart, the padded benches stuck here and there. Either Bee was bald or he shaved his head, and the sleeves of his rose work shirt were rolled up to reveal on each bicep a tattoo—though the colors were more subtle and the drawing finer than any she had seen. On his left arm he had, not the cartoon of a bee, but a Japanese-looking drawing of a honeybee in flight. On his right he wore a shape something like a breaking wave. “Here embryos are growing almost ready to birth. We do that at ninemonth plus two or three weeks. Sometimes we wait tenmonth. We find that extra time gives us stronger babies.” He pressed a panel and a door slid aside, revealing seven human babies joggling slowly upside down, each in a sac of its own inside a larger fluid receptacle.
Connie gaped, her stomach also turning slowly upside down. All in a sluggish row, babies bobbed. Mother the machine. Like fish in the aquarium at Coney Island. Their eyes were closed. One very dark female was kicking. Another, a pink male, she could see clearly from the oversize penis, was crying. Languidly they drifted in a blind school. Bee pressed something and motioned her to listen near the port. The heartbeat, voices speaking.
“That can’t be the babies talking!”
“No!” Bee laughed. “Though they make noise enough. Music, voices, the heartbeat, all these sounds they can hear.”
“Light, Sacco-Vanzetti. How’s it flying?” Luciente said.
The kid was maybe sixteen. Lank brown hair in braids,
swarthy skin, the kid wore a yellow uniform much like everybody’s work clothes. “Is this the woman from the past?”
Luciente performed the introductions.
Sacco-Vanzetti, whose sex she could not tell, stared. “Did you bear alive?”
“Come on Sacco-Vanzetti, don’t be narrow!” Luciente made a face.
“If you mean have I had a baby, yes.” She stuck out her chin.
“Was there a lot of blood?”
“I was knocked out, so how do I know?”
“Was it exciting? Did it feel sexual?”
“It hurt like hell,” Connie snapped, turning back to the wall of babies. “Were you all born from this crazy machine?”
“Almost everybody is now,” the kid said. “I have to go down to threemonth to check the solutions. I’ll be in touch. If you remember more about live bearing, I’d be feathered to hear about it.” The kid went out.
Bee closed the viewing port. “Wamponaug Indians are the source of our culture. Our past. Every village has a culture.”
The way he picked up on that question as if it had just been asked, the way a question floated in him patiently until he was ready to answer it: a memory of sweet and of jagged pain. Maybe she just had a weakness for big black men soft in the belly who moved with that massive grace, although Claud had moved differently. Because of his blindness Claud had held his head a little to the side. She had always thought of a bird. Birds turned the side of the head toward you because their eyes were on the sides, and Claud saw with his ears. “I suppose because you’re black. In my time black people just discovered a pride in being black. My people, Chicanos, were beginning to feel that too. Now it seems like it got lost again.”
Luciente started to say something but visibly checked herself.
Bee beamed, ambling toward another tank where he opened the viewing port. “I have a sweet friend living in Cranberry dark as I am and her tribe is Harlem-Black. I could move there anytime. But if you go over, you won’t find everybody black-skinned like her and me, any more than they’re all tall or all got big feet.” He paused, looking intently at a small embryo, fully formed and floating just at his shoulder level. “At grandcil—
grand council—decisions were made forty years back to breed a high proportion of darker-skinned people and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold on to separate cultural identities. But we broke the bond between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism again. But we don’t want the melting pot where everybody ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, for strangeness breeds richness.”
“It’s so … invented. Artificial. Are there black Irishmen and black Jews and black Italians and black Chinese?”
“Fasure, how not? When you grow up, you can stick to the culture you were raised with or you can fuse into another. But the one we were raised in usually has a … sweet meaning to us.”