Lovelock (17 page)

“That’s nice,” said Carol Jeanne primly. And then, a little more politely, “What’s an extraction room?”

“Guess.” But Penelope’s command was rhetorical, and she continued without waiting for Carol Jeanne to proffer a hunch. “An extraction room is a freeze-dry chamber. We
do
have modern technology here—the cannery is just to teach us all how to work together.”

I waited for Carol Jeanne to correct Penelope. The purpose of the cannery was not to teach humans how to cooperate. It was a practical endeavor, designed to provide cheap food storage until technicians could plumb the resources of our new planet and modernize our lifestyle—perhaps generations after landing. Only a dolt like Penelope would expect to land on Genesis with all the conveniences of modern life. But Carol Jeanne missed her chance to humiliate Penelope. She only smiled that tight, constipated smile, and we ambled off on our own again.

After lunch, we returned to the cannery to start the whole process afresh. This time, people automatically looked to Red as the team’s leader. At first Penelope furrowed her brow in disgust, because
she
was the alleged commander of Mayflower’s little group. But even Penelope succumbed to Red’s charm. He flirted shamelessly with her, as he did with all the women, drawing her into his circle like a trout hooked to a lure. Penelope responded by calling Red her “mascot,” pretending she had sanctioned Red as community cheerleader in the first place. The afternoon’s work passed swiftly once the territory was divided between them.

Not everybody could work at Red’s table; not everyone could stand around the same tomato vat. Red’s area filled up first, and then the adjoining vicinities. Enough workers were assigned to Mayflower’s group that eventually even Carol Jeanne was surrounded by people—people who would rather have been singing with Red.

Carol Jeanne ignored their conversation until it became painfully apparent that some of the words were directed at her. People weren’t talking
to
her, of course; nobody was brave enough for that. But a group of women, led by Dolores of the crimson face, began speaking in the pointed undertones that invited eavesdropping.

“We have to do
something
about them,” Dolores said. “It’s not
fair
to give drones a free ride while the rest of us work.”

“You’re right about that,” said a woman standing next to Dolores around the vat. She was soft and round and fluffy of countenance, but her words were sharp. “I’m not about to give people a free ride just because they’re old.”

Dolores snorted. “I don’t think
old
has anything to do with it. They only let any of these old people get on the Ark because they live with celebrities.”

“Even if they
do
live with celebrities, they’re
still
old,” said a skinny woman whose most prominent feature was an Adam’s apple the size of her nose. “There’s not too much you can
do
with ’em.”

Good old Penelope. She had spread the news of Stef’s and Mamie’s unemployment far and wide.

Carol Jeanne blushed. Her skin never attained the cardinal red of Dolores’s complexion, but the words obviously upset her. She didn’t like confrontation, and it was especially hard for her to defend Mamie and Stef when she detested Mamie so much. But the women had issued a challenge, and Carol Jeanne was never one who could ignore a gauntlet once it had been thrown down. You don’t get to her kind of stature in the scientific world by being a mouse.

She ripped the skin from a tomato, cored it, and quartered it, bruising its flesh in her anger. Finally she said, “I agree with you completely. But what
should
we do with my in-laws? The only thing I’ve thought of so far is to jettison them from the Ark and let them die in space. That’ll do the trick, won’t it?”

The woman with the big Adam’s apple swallowed hard. It’s quite possible that she hadn’t realized that the old people they were talking about were linked to the illustrious Cocciolone. She was obviously embarrassed. “I don’t think we were talking about your in-laws. We were only talking about drones in general.”

“Oh. I’m glad to know there are
other
drones who live with celebrities. Give me their names, will you? I want to send sympathy cards to their families after they’ve been locked up to starve because they’re too old and feeble to do their fair share.”

Even Dolores backed down then. Like most cowards, she was only brave until she was confronted. “Of course we don’t want to
hurt
anyone,” she said. “We just have to find something for them to
do
.”

But Fluffy didn’t retreat. “Drones use up as many nonrenewable resources as productive people. If they can function at all, they can at least do sanitation work, and if they’re truly so feeble and incapacitated that they can’t even do that, they should be put to sleep and recycled.”

“How practical of you,” said Carol Jeanne. “It’s such a good idea to wring the last drop of work out of people and then off them when they’re too old. How old are
you
, by the way?”

Fluffy, who looked to be at least a million years old and counting, said, “
I’m
still productive.”

“Oh, yes,” said Carol Jeanne. “Producing gossip and ill-feelings at quite a remarkable rate.” Oh, she had a mouth on her, when she cared enough to use it.

Fluffy turned her back on Carol Jeanne.

But I knew—and I’m certain that Carol Jeanne knew—that Fluffy was right. Old people should never have been allowed on the Ark. And they really
did
need to become productive, if only because, if they weren’t, they would never truly belong to this self-consciously pioneering society.

With the argument silenced, if not settled, Carol Jeanne retreated to the private world where she had always spent so much of her time. Even as her hands skinned tomatoes or stirred the stewed tomatoes as they simmered or filled the vacu-board containers with the soupy contents of the second run of the day, her eyes were empty and her mind was elsewhere. I observed the scene for her, filing conversations away and watching people as it was my wont to do.

I noticed that while Fluffy was as vindictive as her remarks to Carol Jeanne had indicated, Adam’s Apple seemed like a decent enough sort. She had apparently been drawn into the conversation because drones were a subject of worry for her, rather than because she wanted to antagonize Carol Jeanne. I focused on Adam’s Apple several times during the remainder of the day as she did little, decent things, such as lifting heavy pans for people who were frailer than she was, or taking a glass of cool water to an older woman who appeared to be suffering from the heat. But if Adam’s Apple hoped that Carol Jeanne wouldn’t judge her solely by the one bad experience, her efforts were in vain. Like a true introvert, Carol Jeanne never seemed to notice. On the other hand, she didn’t really care about the argument, either. Not caring is the next best thing to forgiving, isn’t it?

At last the quality control team assured us that the second batch of stewed tomatoes was good. We were free. Although I had only perched on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder throughout the day, being forbidden to handle the foodstuffs myself, I was still exhausted and bruised from yesterday’s misadventures in low gee and my venture into the wonderful world of excruciatingly painful autoeroticism. I was sorely ready for a rest.

Rest wasn’t on the agenda, however. Workday customarily ended with a community picnic, one of the many obligatory functions that held a township and its people together. When we walked up the ladderway from the tube, it seemed for a moment as though a mob had gathered and was rioting. Thus we learned that Mayflower’s workday picnic was not a sedate affair.

If Mayflower had a population of 500, at least 499 of them were crammed into the town square. Children played games on the lawn. Mothers spread tablecloths on the ground for their families, and workers piled platters of food on the long banquet tables. I climbed atop Carol Jeanne’s head to get a better view of the food and was rewarded with a beatific vision. There were hundreds of bananas in a crate—a lifetime supply of them. If they had brought exactly 500 bananas to the picnic, I predicted that at least a dozen humans would go without their banana ration today. After my sorry lunch at the cannery I estimated I could eat nearly two bananas for dinner. The other ten would be stored away for future retrieval.

I saw Stef sitting underneath a tree, wearily leaning against the pot that held the roots. The spindly maple offered scant shade, but Stef appropriated what little he could find. He looked tired and old; the trip across space had drained him, leaving a fragile old man where Red’s father used to be. I didn’t know what task he had performed at the fish hatchery on this Workday, but he was too old and feeble to have made a good job of it.

“Do you see the children?” Carol Jeanne asked Red.

“Not yet,” he said.

“Lovelock, help us find them,” she said to me. “They’re probably feeling pretty lost in this crowd.”

I thought: My, but we’re maternal, aren’t we? What about
my
children? They’re
really
lost, aren’t they—since they can never be conceived.

When I didn’t instantly obey, I began to feel deeply anxious. My conditioning kicking in. Better get to looking for the bratlings.

“They’re not lost,” said Red, rather sharply. “They’re with Mother.” The change in him was remarkable. No longer the jocular, hardworking, fun-loving, hail-fellow-well-met singing suck-up who had dominated the cannery session, Red was now testy and tired. I wanted to suggest to him that if he needed to relieve tension, he could find nothing more satisfying than to kick a pig.

But I had a job to do. I stretched upright on Carol Jeanne’s shoulder, balancing myself with a hand atop her head. My vision was acute, but human children all look alike to me, especially when all I can see of them is the tops of their darling little heads. I had better luck scanning the crowd for Mamie.
She
was easy to find, dressed as she was in a garish orange dress. She was busily ignoring Lydia and Emmy, asserting her status by giving orders to workers around a banquet table. Lydia and Emmy clung to the hem of her skirt, looking forlorn.

I directed Carol Jeanne to the little girls, but when they caught sight of us it was Red they wanted.

“Daddy!” Emmy’s voice was a screech.

“
Daddy!
” Lydia and Emmy seemed to believe that the person who screamed the loudest was somehow superior. This time, Lydia won the prize.

They let go of Mamie’s skirt and hurried into Red’s arms. He smiled just a little
too
broadly, and I thought uncharitably that Carol Jeanne and Red were in competition as surely as their daughters were, and
this
battle, for the hearts of the children, Red had won.

Carol Jeanne shared my sentiments. She tensed the muscles in her upper back, a sure sign of her anger. She smiled briefly, scrutinizing the throng as if she were looking for witnesses to her humiliation. Sure enough, Emmy’s and Lydia’s shrieks had attracted some attention, even over the hubbub of the multitude. Several Mayflower women were watching the tender scene between Red and the daughters who loved him better than they loved their mother.

This was a spectacle I had witnessed more than once before. Only now, as Carol Jeanne smiled and turned away, did I understand that the tug of war wasn’t really over the affection of Lydia and Emmy at all. Carol Jeanne didn’t necessarily want the children to love her best—she simply didn’t want anyone else to realize it. When the children ran to Red, she looked to others like a failure of a mother. She didn’t like to fail at anything, especially in front of spectators.

“Liz,” said Carol Jeanne. I thought she wanted me to look for her, but no. She said Liz’s name because she had seen her.

Liz was spreading a tablecloth on the lawn, being observed by a passel of children and a man whose similarity to the children was so strong he could only be Liz’s husband. The man was strong and dumb-looking—football material if I’d ever seen it. Then I remembered his connection with football was not as a player, but as an orthopedist for football teams. He folded his arms before him like a coach standing on the sidelines, letting Liz do the work as he supervised her progress.

“The cloth isn’t straight over here,” he said, making no effort to help align it.

“I’ll get it in a minute. I can’t do the whole cloth at once.”

“We can’t eat on a cloth that’s crinkled up like that.”

“I
said
, I’ll get it in a minute.”

Carol Jeanne stood beside the little panorama, waiting for Liz to notice her and say hello. But I’d already seen enough marital discord for one afternoon, so I chattered in her ear and did the food gesture, practically cramming, my whole arm down my throat.

“Go ahead and eat,” she said to me.

“We plan to,” said Liz, laughing. “Hi, Carol Jeanne.”

The surly expression on her husband’s face immediately changed to a happy, crinkly smile. Sometimes humans make me sick. I ran down to Carol Jeanne’s elbow and hopped to the ground.

The crowd was thick enough that I put myself in a dangerous situation, scampering over the lawn because there weren’t enough trees to make my progress in the air. But the scent of bananas was heavy in the breeze, drawing me as inexorably as the sight of Liz’s brute of a husband pushed me away. I dodged human feet and playing children as I made my way to the banana cache.

There was a commotion in the center of the common, and I halted my progress long enough to shinny up a tree and investigate. Red was at the center of the noise. He had commandeered a gaggle of children and was beginning to lead them in a game I didn’t recognize. Parents stood around in a loose circle, watching as their children intently focused on Red to learn the rules of the game. Just as Red had won followers at the cannery, he was repeating his performance here. Apparently the cannery wasn’t an isolated battle. He had a major campaign in mind. He was going to be the best-loved man in Mayflower, and if Carol Jeanne looked drab and unpleasant in comparison, well…she
had
her career, after all. Red didn’t have to worry about
her
.