Lovelock (18 page)

From the tree I was a short run away from the banana pile. I hid behind a table leg, waiting until the workers on the food line were distracted by conversation. Then I reached into a barrel and pulled out a large banana. I climbed a tree with my prize and ate it quickly; nobody molested me. My success emboldened me, and I took two bananas the next time, hoping to hide them for future consumption.

I hurried toward home, planning to hide my treasures in a tree near the house and then return to the food line for more. As I approached the outskirts of the common, I spied the children I had met at Odie Lee’s funeral. My first impulse was to detour around them, accomplish my mission to hide these bananas, and get back to steal a half-dozen others. But my curiosity took precedence over my instinct for survival, and I chose the tree Peter was leaning against to hide my stash.

Neither Peter nor Diana heard the leaves rustle as I scaled the tree. I balanced my bananas in the crook of a branch and lowered myself through the foliage until I saw their faces. Diana had tears on her cheeks. As Peter stood above her he chewed an apple, apparently oblivious to her misery. I’d observed adolescent males enough to know this was only a pose, however. I already knew from watching the two of them together that Peter did care about Diana, even though his concern remained a secret even from himself.

Diana wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her words were unintelligible for a moment, but then I did hear the end of her complaint. “She hates us. She always has. You
know
she doesn’t want us here.”

Peter took a bite of apple and barely chewed it before swallowing. He scooped up a dribble of juice from the apple skin with a forefinger and then sucked the juice from his fingertip. Then, “She doesn’t hate us, Diana. We’re not Hansel and Gretel, all right? How often do I have to tell you that?”

“But she doesn’t want us here.”

“Maybe not.”

“Then why did she fight so hard for us? We could have stayed with Father, if we’d known. At least,
I
would have.”

“Not me,” said Peter. Then, noticing Diana’s crestfallen face, he added, “And I would have brought you with me, Virgin Huntress. You can’t go to another world by yourself. At least,
I
can’t. It wouldn’t be any fun.”

“
Mother
wanted to come alone.”

“That she did. But she really doesn’t hate us. Sometimes when people mess up their lives and want to make a fresh start, the way they do it is to go somewhere nobody knows them. You can be a different person, because nobody remembers the mistakes you made or how nasty you used to be. It’s just like erasing a computer’s memory. Once you reformat the memory drive, nobody knows what used to be there; all they care is what’s on the drive now.”

What a compassionate attitude he seemed to have toward his mother. I wondered how he really felt.

Diana put her hand on Peter’s knee. It was the first time I’d seen her touch him with tenderness, and she looked like a miniature adult. “Peter, what happened to Dill Aaronson wasn’t your fault. That hovercar came out of nowhere. You were lucky you weren’t killed too.”

“We aren’t talking about
me
. We’re talking about Mother. Back on Earth, Mother always rubbed everyone the wrong way. She didn’t mean to; she just didn’t know how to be nice to people.”

“She still doesn’t—or haven’t you noticed?”

“That’s the point, Diana. We are who we are. We can change habits, maybe, but our character is as much a part of us as our fingerprints. Mother is Mother; she’ll never change. But she didn’t know she wasn’t going to change when she left Earth, and that’s why she wanted to leave us behind. Some people want so much to start over again that they’ll do anything—even leaving their families behind on Earth, if that’s what it takes.”

Diana took a lock of hair and held it in front of her face, frowning as she inspected the ends. She singled out one strand and bit it off, throwing the end to the ground before she looked for another damaged hair. Then she said, “You can’t be right. Not about Mother. All she had to do was tell us to stay home, and we would have done it. Even you.”

“But she’s our mother. She had to fight for us. What would people think?”

“She didn’t have to fight so hard.”

Peter shrugged.

“Father’s dead by now,” Diana said. “If we’d stayed home, we’d be dead too.”

“Not yet. Time won’t
really
change until the Ark takes off.
Then
Father will be dead. Then
we
would have been dead. I don’t know about you, but I don’t
want
to be dead. I want to be on the Ark, going to a new planet that nobody’s ever seen before. I wish Father had come with us, but I’d rather be here with Mother than back on Earth with him.”

“I’d rather be here with Father, and
Mother
back on Earth.”

What a wise and perceptive child, I thought. Most children don’t come to understand how loathsome their parents are until they’re
much
older. But Dolores had made her daughter into a precocious mother-hater rather early in life.

“And I’d like to be grown-up and handsome and rich,” said Peter. “Wishes are a waste of time, Diana. They only make you unhappy.”

Diana sighed. She opened her mouth to say something, but a rustling in the tree branches drew her attention. I looked upward to the source of the noise, barely in time to dodge a banana that had slid loose from its hiding place and was toppling to the ground.

My presence thus betrayed, I had no choice but to make an appearance. I somersaulted out of the foliage, landing squarely atop Peter’s head. Peter yelped and Diana laughed. Temporarily their misery was forgotten.

“What were you doing here?” Peter asked.

I concealed my face behind my hands.
Hiding, of course
.

“Why didn’t you come out in the open?”

Gestures couldn’t convey that my presence would have ended the conversation, so I pantomimed an elaborate shrug.
I don’t know
.

“It would help if we had a clipboard,” Peter said. “We can’t talk to him without a clipboard.”

Diana rolled her eyes. “Sure you can, stupid—unless that notebook you keep in your pocket is for decoration.” She turned to me. “Peter thinks he’s Mr. Scientist. He’s got a notebook welded to his rear end, and he writes all his important discoveries in there.
I
think the notebook is empty. The only discovery
he’s
made is that Carolee Engebritson has breasts.”

Peter leapt at Diana. Unless I intervened, they’d be rolling on the grass within moments. I wasn’t in the mood for playing, so I ran down Peter’s back and pulled the notebook from his back pocket. I leapt with it to a lower branch of my banana tree, and the sudden movement knocked my remaining banana to the ground.

As Diana had suspected, the notebook was empty of important discoveries. But there was a pen on a string attached to the spiral binding, and I uncapped the pen to write a note.

Sticking my tongue firmly between my teeth—my helpless-hardworking-monkey pose—I wrote, “Help me get bananas.” It wasn’t
War and Peace
, but there wasn’t much else I could say. I didn’t know how to erase Diana’s anguish. If Peter was right, Dolores really
didn’t
want her children with her in Mayflower, and there wasn’t an easy solution for that.

Diana giggled. “You already
have
bananas, silly. They’re all over the ground.”

“He wants more,” Peter said, and I bowed in agreement. “He wants
zillions
of bananas,” he added, and I put the notebook under my armpit as I clapped my hands.

Diana and Peter were so malleable that I didn’t have to do anything from then on but sit in the tree and wait for them to return with armfuls of precious cargo. I was gratified to see that they were smart enough to choose bananas of varying degrees of ripeness. I’d be able to return to the hiding place for days, feeding myself as each fruit reached its peak of goodness.

Peter was wedging one of the last bananas into the crotch of a tree branch when Dolores cleared her throat from below him.

“Peter! You are too old and too big to be climbing trees. Do I have to watch you
every minute?
”

“Yes, Mother. I mean, no, Mother.” The child’s countenance withered, so much that if I had estimated his height then I would have guessed him to be several inches shorter than my previous approximation. He shoved the rest of the bananas aside and jumped from the rim of the tree pot, and I hid behind the tree trunk to spare Diana and Peter from an extra dose of Dolores’s wrath.

Diana wasn’t so easily intimidated, however. “But
Mother—
we were only playing with—” She winced as Peter pinched her from behind, but she lamely finished with, “—the tree.”

Dolores sighed. “I’m sure you’ve had an enlightening time, but I’m ready to go home. Have you eaten?”

“Yes,” said Peter, even as Diana said, “No.”

“Then get a plate, Diana. Peter, since you lied about it, you’ll go without. Come on. Let’s go home.”

Hiding behind Peter, I pulled a banana from my store and slid it down inside his trousers, hooking the stem over the waistband. He would have
some
dinner tonight, no thanks to Dolores, and what he ate would doubtless be more palatable than the overcooked mess I’d seen on the picnic tables.

I found Carol Jeanne and spent the rest of the evening with her. She had left Liz to her own family and stood at the periphery of the crowd that Red had drawn to himself. By now, Red’s followers constituted a group of at least fifty humans who were so gullible that they mistook his extroversion for brilliance and goodness. He was particularly attractive to the children of Mayflower, who constituted a wave of humanity around his knees.

None of the adoring parents noticed how Red gave Emmy to Carol Jeanne for diaper duty, or how, when Lydia got cranky or tired, he shunted her off to Carol Jeanne too. The only comments I heard were murmured compliments, as parents asked each other the identity of the fascinating newcomer who was so good with their children.

I was glad when the sun dimmed and Carol Jeanne took me home. I was already in bed, fresh from the memory of her goodnight kiss, when I remembered that my day was not over. Despite my exhaustion, the sun’s null gravity beckoned me. My most important task of the day was yet to begin.

I was going back up the wall tonight. If I could master my responses to null gravity, I could master anything. Maybe even the pain of fatherhood.

Pink and I might have been the only slaves in our household, since we had been purchased, but that did not mean that everyone else was free. During the weeks that I struggled to break the shackles of my conditioning, others, too, found that our new life on the Ark might provide an opportunity to slip out of bondage. We were no longer in the same society that we had lived in before, and therefore we could no longer fill the same roles. What had been bearable before might be unbearable now.

I had only been at the business of climbing the walls for a few days when I was startled out of my exhausted sleep one morning by Emmy’s shrieking. “Bees!” she cried. “Bees! Bees!”

I had visions of a swarm of Africanized bees stinging her to death, which did not seem an unmitigated tragedy. But the quiet reaction of the adults told me that it was no emergency. I got up and loped into the kitchen, where Emmy was jumping up and down in front of the household computer. Sure enough, there were bees pictured on the screen. It was a little animation program, apparently sent to our house over the network. A sort of message.

And not a very subtle one, either. When I arrived, Red and Pink were already in the kitchen with Emmy and Lydia, and soon Carol Jeanne, Mamie, and Stef emerged from the back of the house to see what was going on. The animation was simple enough. A flower appeared somewhere on the screen. Worker bees discovered it, swarmed over it, and then flew back to the hive. On top of the hive were two sleeping bees. The workers came and deposited their honey inside the hive. As if it were a translucent tank, we could see the hive filling up with honey. Then the worker bees flew off. Immediately the two sleeping bees woke up, flew to the hive entrance, and drank the honey until the hive was empty again. Then the hive sank out of sight and a new flower appeared.

After about three flowers, however, there was a change. When the workers came back to find the hive empty again, they picked up the two sleeping bees, carried them off, and dropped them in front of a giant human shoe, which came down hard and squished them. As the workers flew back to the hive, buzzing happily, a message crawled along the bottom of the screen: “Drones are thieves, but they can’t steal the workers’ honey forever.”

“Where did you get this silly program, Red?” asked Mamie.

“It isn’t a program,” said Red. “It’s a message.”

“You mean somebody
sent
this to us?” said Mamie. “But they didn’t even sign it. What does it mean?”

Could she really have been so oblivious? I think she expected everyone to protect her from the nastiness of the message, so that she didn’t have to admit that she understood.

Stef answered her, and his voice was not nice. “This message is from one of our neighbors,” he said. “Someone who thinks that nobody should be excused from working as long as they have their health. Someone who thinks that it’s a shameful thing for you and me to do nothing.”

“Well, that’s envy,” said Mamie. “Envy is an ugly thing.”

“I know something uglier,” said Stef.

His words hung in the air, unanswered.

Finally, Carol Jeanne said, “Lovelock, I expect you to track down who sent this message. The network surely has some way to trace the mail.”

“Pure nastiness,” said Red. “This sort of thing is what tears apart fragile communities. It has to be stopped.”

“Just what I think,” said Mamie.

“Well, it’s not what
I
think,” said Stef.

“Oh, so you think vicious anonymous hate mail is civilized behavior?” asked Mamie witheringly.

“I think what’s tearing apart the community is the insistence of some people that they’re above work,” said Stef. “Well,
I
don’t think I’m above work. There are jobs I could do.”

“At
your
age?” said Mamie. “What have you ever done, except call your broker about your investments and go to board meetings once a year where you rubberstamp the decisions of
real
businessmen? There’s not much call for that
here
. We are not the kind of people who do the kind of work that is required in this little…village.”

“Maybe you’re not,” said Stef. “But I am. Even if it’s only permanent sanitation detail, I can do it.”

“Don’t be absurd,” said Mamie. “We didn’t come here in order to sink back into the lower classes.”

“No,” said Stef. “We came here so you could continue to coast on the achievements of your daughter-in-law.”

“That is so offensive it’s not even worthy of—”

Stef, having left such thoughts unsaid for so many years, must have been unable to stem the flow of words. “Well, Mamie, you miscalculated. This is a society that values people for what they accomplish, and not for whom they’re related to. You should have stayed on Earth.”

“And lose my son and my grandchildren, all taken away into space?” Mamie’s voice trembled.

“You’re both making too much of this nasty little anonymous message,” said Red, trying to make peace.

“This nasty little anonymous message only forces the issue,” said Stef. “I’ve put up with complete indolence long enough. Whoever sent that message is right. It’s an offense against everything that this Ark is supposed to represent, to have Mamie and me be completely unproductive. And I, for one, am bored out of my mind with nothing to do.”

Mamie answered with immediate contempt. “It’s not
my
fault if you have such poverty of imagination that you—”

“It’s not my poverty of imagination that makes my life intolerable,” said Stef. “It’s you.”

I was astonished but also delighted. I had never realized that Stef had it in him to say such a thing.

Neither, for that matter, had Mamie. She gasped. Her face reddened. “How can you say such a cruel, heartless—”

“Heartless is insisting that I be as lazy as you,” said Stef, “and earn the contempt of everyone around me when it’s completely unnecessary. You only keep me home to feed your vanity, so that you can be the only woman on the Ark whose husband doesn’t have to work for a living. Well, I have news for you. I
want
to earn a living. I always have. And now I’m going to.”

“No you’re not,” said Mamie. Her voice was savage. This was as angry—as desperate?—as I had ever seen her.

“I’m going today to find an assignment they’re willing to train me for.”

“Perhaps you should think about this for a while,” offered Red.

“Shut up, Red,” said Stef.

“There!” cried Mamie triumphantly. “Is this what we’ve come to? Rudeness and hate! Low-class behavior!”

“That’s right,” said Stef.

“You don’t even care that you are becoming
…common!
” Obviously it was the cruelest thing Mamie could think of to say.

I looked at Carol Jeanne and saw that she, too, was enjoying this. In fact, she could hardly keep from laughing.

“Yes,” said Stef. “That’s exactly what I intend to become. A common man. A regular ordinary citizen of the Ark.”

“Well, I won’t have it!” cried Mamie. “You can’t do this to me! You can’t drag me down into the
muck
with you!” You would have thought he had proposed group sex with a flock of diseased sheep.

“I’m not dragging you anywhere,” said Stef. “You can stay home and hibernate if you want.”

“No husband of mine is going to—”

“That’s really your choice,” said Stef.

“So you’re leaving it up to me?” said Mamie. “Good. You’re not doing it.”

“No, Mamie,” said Stef. “I mean that it’s your choice whether I do it as your husband or not. But I
will
do it.”

“You will
not
do it! I forbid it! You made a solemn covenant with me!”

“For richer or for poorer,” said Stef. “In sickness and in health. Well, I stayed with you through a lifetime of sickness. Now I’m poor, just like everybody else.”

“Not me!” said Mamie. “I am not poor, I will never be poor, and if you insist on living like a poor man then I’m done with you.”

Stef turned to Red. “I’ve been reading the Compact, as I should have done long ago. I hereby declare myself to be no longer a member of your household. I’ll be in bachelor quarters for the time being, and I’ll petition to have myself associated with another village. I’ll be packed and out of here in an hour.”

“Father, you don’t have to leave,” said Red.

“You don’t understand,” said Stef. “I
want
to leave.”

“You’re just trying to make me do what you want, you manipulative, controlling, dictatorial
…man!
” cried Mamie.

“Not at all,” said Stef. “I’m just sick of sleeping on the damned couch.” He walked out of the room.

Mamie, red-faced and furious, looked back and forth from Red to Carol Jeanne. “And you’re just going to sit there? You’re just going to let this happen?”

“I’ve been reading the rules of life here,” said Carol Jeanne, “and he has a perfect right to go if he wants to.”

Mamie curled her lip and turned away from her. “Red, this is our
family
here. This is your father who is going to humiliate us in front of everybody by making this silly family tiff a public matter. The gossip will be dreadful. You’ve got to
talk
to him and get him to see reason.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Red.

“What do you mean?” said Carol Jeanne. “Stef’s not the one who’s being unreasonable.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” said Mamie.

“Carol Jeanne, please let me handle this,” said Red.

“Your father wants to do what is required of every adult male on this Ark—have a job. And you’re going to ask
him
to see reason?”

Mamie squared off for battle. “Stay out of family matters that don’t concern you, Carol Jeanne.”

“Excuse me,” said Carol Jeanne, “but I’m a part of this family.”

“Maybe it’s all right for Cocciolones to walk out on their marriages,” said Mamie, “but
Todds
don’t.”

“I think the evidence at hand indicates that Todds
do
,” said Carol Jeanne.

“Carol Jeanne,” said Red. “Drop this discussion at once.”

“Let her talk,” said Mamie, confident because Red was so clearly on her side. “Obviously family means nothing to her.”

Carol Jeanne rose to her feet. “If family meant nothing to me, Mamie, then you wouldn’t be here, because the only reason I allowed you to follow me into the Ark and continue to live in the same house with me was because I care about family. If you weren’t my husband’s mother I would never even have met you, because I have never wasted my time going to the kind of parties where people like you show up to fawn over celebrities. Yet I’ve had you in my house and endured your whims and your snobbery and your vicious comments about Italians and Catholics and Cocciolones because I love Red and because you are the grandmother of my children. So don’t tell me that I don’t care about family.”

It was a speech that was about seven years overdue. I jumped onto Carol Jeanne’s shoulder and applauded and hooted.

Mamie looked from Carol Jeanne to me and back again, and then burst into tears and fled the room. I continued hooting and clapping. The tyrant had been pulled down from her throne.

Red was not taking it well, however. Since he couldn’t argue with anything Carol Jeanne said, he struck back the only way a coward like him could think of. He reached for
me
.

What he had in mind I’ll never know, because Carol Jeanne caught his arm before he could touch me.

“Don’t,” she said.

“That damned monkey is laughing at my mother!”

“Don’t you ever try to lay a hand on my witness again,” said Carol Jeanne.

It was an interesting choice of words. She didn’t call me Lovelock or even “that damned monkey.” She called me her witness, which meant that she was reminding Red that the law absolutely forbade anyone to interfere with a witness doing its job. It was an outrageous thing for a wife to say to a husband—it was reducing him to the intimacy of a stranger. I loved it.

“You had no right to interfere between my parents,” said Red.

“I didn’t interfere.”

“You took sides!” Red insisted.

“So did you,” said Carol Jeanne. “The difference is that I sided with the man who was asking nothing more than to live with dignity as a full citizen of the Ark. And you were siding with the woman who was using her connection with me as a way of raising herself above other people, which is foolish and self-destructive and I kept waiting for you to say something, for you to do
anything
to get your mother under control and you never did, not even when your father was walking out on her because he couldn’t take her psychotic hunger for control any longer.”

“Psychotic?” said Red contemptuously. “Stick to your own discipline, Carol Jeanne. You don’t even know what the word means.”

“I know exactly what it means,” said Carol Jeanne. “Just because you don’t understand what
I
do doesn’t meant that I don’t understand
your
little quasi-science.”

“Mother is not a psychotic. She has serious neuroses arising out of her upbringing and some traumatic—”

“Oh, is she your patient? Isn’t it unethical for you to tell me your diagnosis of her?”

“She’s not my patient, she’s my mother!”

“And I’m your wife. Why not make the tiniest effort, maybe just one day out of the year, to actually see things from
my
point of view instead of always demanding that I understand
her
, that I be patient with
her
. She runs you like a puppet.”

“I can see that this is not about Mother. This is about your resentment of my ability to maintain a warm relationship with—”

“If you dare to say one more word of this manipulative diagnosis of me,” said Carol Jeanne, “you will be rooming with Stef by nightfall.”

“Is that a threat?”

“I will not have you turn your psychological jargon into a weapon to be used to win an argument. What
I’m
seeing right now is a man who is so dominated by his mother that he is willing to throw away his marriage in order to protect her from the trauma of growing up and acting like an adult. So please do keep on shielding her from any chance of ever becoming a mature, productive, empathic human being, Red. I knew that was a facet of your life when I married you. But don’t you ever dare to accuse me of being envious of the sickness that you call motherlove.”