Time Enough for Love (29 page)

“Llita, can you read?”

“No, Master.”

“Make that ‘Captain,’ instead. How about you, Joe?”

“No, Captain.”

“Arithmetic? Numbers?”

“Oh, yes, Captain, I know numbers. Two and two is four, two and three makes five, and three and five is nine—”

His sister corrected him. “Seven, Josie—not nine.”

“That’s enough,” Sheffield said. “I can see we’ll be busy.” He thought, while he hummed: “So it’s well to… Have a sister… Or even an old captain—” He added aloud: “When you have finished breakfast, take care of your personal needs, then tidy your rooms—shipshape and neatly, I’ll inspect later—and make the bed in my cabin, but don’t touch anything else there, especially my desk. Then each of you take a bath. Yes, that’s what I said: Bathe. Aboard ship everyone bathes every day, oftener if you wish. There is plenty of pure water; we recycle it and we’ll finish the voyage with thousands of liters more than we started with. Don’t ask why; that’s the way it works and I’ll explain later.” (Several months later, at least—to youngsters unsure about three plus five.) “When you’re through, say, an hour and a half from now—Joe, can you read a clock?”

Joe stared at the old-fashioned ship’s clock mounted on a bulkhead. “I’m not sure, Captain. That one has too many numbers.”

“Oh, yes, of course; Blessed is on another system. Try to be back here when the little hand is straight out to the left and the big hand is straight up. But this time it doesn’t matter if you are late; it takes awhile to shake down. Don’t neglect your baths to be on time. Joe, shampoo your head. Llita, lean toward me, dear; let me sniff your hair. Yes, you shampoo, too.” (Were there hair nets aboard? If he cut the pseudogravity and let them go free-fall, they would need hair nets—or haircuts. A haircut would not hurt Joe, but his sister’s long black hair was her best feature—would help her catch a husband on Valhalla. Oh, well, if there were no hair nets—he didn’t think there were, as he kept his own hair free-fall short—the girl could braid her hair and tie something around it. Could he spare power to maintain an eighth gee all the way? People not used to free-fall got flabby, could even damage their bodies.

(Don’t worry about it now.) “Get our quarters tidy, get clean yourselves, come back here. Git.”

He made a list:

Set up a schedule of duties—N.B.: Teach them to cook!

Start school: What subjects?

Basic arithmetic, obviously—but don’t bother to teach them to read that jargon spoken on Blessed; they were never going back there—never! But that jargon would have to be ship’s language until he had them speaking Galacta, and they must learn to read and write in it—and English, too: Many books he would have to use for their hurry-up education were in English. Did he have tapes for the variation of Galacta spoken on Valhalla? Well, kids their age quickly picked up local accent and idiom and vocabulary.

What was far more important was how to heal their stunted, uh, “souls.” Their personalities—

How could he take full-grown domestic animals and turn them into able, happy human beings, educated in every needful way and capable of competing in a free society?
Willing
to compete, undismayed by it—He was just beginning to see the size of the “stray cat” problem he had taken on. Was he going to have to keep them as pets for fifty or sixty years or whatever, until they died naturally?

Long, long before that, the boy Woodie Smith had found a half-dead fox kit in the woods, apparently lost by its mother, or perhaps the vixen was dead. He took it home, nursed it with a bottle, raised it in a cage through one winter. In the spring he took it back where he had found it, left it there in the cage with the door latched open.

He checked a few days later, intending to salvage the cage.

He found the creature cowering in the cage, half starved and horribly dehydrated—with the door still latched open. He took it home, again nursed it back to health, built a chickenwire run for it, and never again tried to turn it loose. In the words of his grandfather, “The poor critter had never had a chance to learn how to be a fox.”

Could he teach these cowed and ignorant animals how to be human?

They returned to his wardroom when “the little hand was straight out and the big hand was straight up”—they waited outside the door until this was so, and Captain Sheffield pretended not to notice.

But when they came in, he glanced at the clock and said, “Right on time—good! You’ve certainly shampooed, but remind me to find combs for you.” (What other toilet articles did they need? Would he have to teach them how to use them? And—oh, damn it!—was there anything in the ship for a woman’s menstrual needs? What could be improvised? Well, with luck that problem would hold off a few days. No point in asking her; she couldn’t add. Tarnation, the ship was not equipped for passengers.)

“Sit down. No, wait a moment. Come here, dear.” It seemed to the Captain that the garment she wore was clinging suspiciously; he felt it, it was wet. “Did you leave that on when you bathed?”

“No, Mas—No, Captain; I washed it.”

“I see.” He recalled that its gaudy pattern had been enhanced by coffee and other things while the girl was botching breakfast. “Take it off and hang it somewhere; don’t let it dry on your body.”

She started slowly to comply. Her chin quivered—and he recalled how she had admired herself in a tall mirror when he bought it for her. “Wait a moment, Llita. Joe, take off your breechclout. And sandals.”

The lad complied at once.

“Thank you, Joe. Don’t put that clout back on without washing it; by now it’s dirty even though it looks clean. Don’t wear it under way unless it suits you. You sit down. Llita, were you wearing anything when I bought you?”

“No… Captain.”

“Am I wearing anything now?”

“No, Captain.”

“There are times and places to wear clothes—and other times and places when clothes are silly. If this were a passenger ship, we would all wear clothes and I would wear a fancy uniform. But it is not, and there is nobody here but me and your brother. See that instrument there? That’s a thermohumidostat which tells the ship’s computer to hold the temperature at twenty-seven Celsius and forty percent humidity, with random variation to stimulate us—which may not mean anything to you but is my notion of comfort in bare skin. For an hour each afternoon it drops that temperature to encourage exercise, as flab is the curse of shipboard life.

“If that cycle doesn’t suit you two, we’ll reach a compromise. But first we’ll try it my way. Now about that wet rag plastered to your hips—If you are stupid, you’ll let it dry where it is and be uncomfortable. If you are smart, you’ll hang it up and let it dry without wrinkling. That’s a suggestion, not an order; if you wish, you may wear it at all times. But don’t sit down with it on you, wet; there is no reason to get cushions wet. Can you sew?”

“Yes, Captain. Uh…some.”

“I’ll see what I can dig up. You are wearing the only woman’s garment in the ship, and if you insist on clothes, you’ll need to make some for the months ahead. You’ll need something for Valhalla, too: it’s not as warm as Blessed. Women there wear trousers and short coats; men wear trousers and long coats; everyone wears boots. I had three outfits custom-made on Landfall; maybe we can make do with them until I can get you two to a tailor. Boots—Mine would fit you like socks on a rooster. Hmm—We can wrap your feet so that a pair will stay on long enough to get you to a bootery.

“We won’t worry about that now. Join the conference—standing up and wet, or sitting down and comfortable.”

Estrellita bit her lip and decided in favor of comfort.

Minerva, those youngsters were brighter than I had expected. At first they studied because I told them to. But once they tasted the magic of the printed word, they were hooked. They learned to read like grass through a goose and didn’t want to do anything else. Especially stories. I had a good library, mostly in micro, thousands of those, but also a few dozen valuable bound books, facsimile antiques I had picked up on Landfall where they speak English and use Galacta only as a trade tongue. Savvy Oz books, Minerva?

Yes, of course you do; I helped plan the Great Library and included my childhood favorites as well as more sober things. I did make sure that Joe and Llita read a spread of sober stuff but mostly I let them wallow in stones—The Just So Stories, and the Oz books, and Alice in Wonderland, and A
Child’s Garden of Verses
, and
Two Little Savages
, and such. Too limited; they were books from my childhood, three centuries before the Diaspora. On the other hand, every human culture in the Galaxy derives from that one.

But I tried to make sure that they understood the difference between fiction and history—difficult, as I wasn’t certain that there was a difference. Then I had to explain that a fairy tale was still a different sort, one step farther along the spectrum from fact to fancy.

Minerva, this is
very
hard to explain to an inexperienced mind. What is “magic”? You are more magical than any “magic” in fairy tales, and it does no good to say that you are a product of science, rather than magic, in speaking to kids who have no idea what is meant by “science”—and I wasn’t sure that the distinction was valid even when I was explaining the distinction. In my wanderings I have run across magic many times—which simply says that I have seen wonders I could not explain.

I finally let it go by asserting ex
cathedra
that some stories were just for fun and not necessarily true—
Gulliver’s Travels
were not the same sort of thing as
The Adventures of Marco Polo
, while
Robinson Crusoe
lay somewhere in between—and they should
ask
me, if in doubt.

They did ask, sometimes, and accepted my decision without argument. But I could see that they did not always believe me. That pleased me; they were starting to think for themselves—didn’t matter if they were wrong. Llita was simply politely respectful to me about Oz. She believed in the Emerald City with all her heart and, if she had had her druthers, she would have been going there rather than to Valhalla. Well, so would I.

The important thing was that they were cutting the cord.

I did not hesitate to use fiction in teaching them. Fiction is a faster way to get a feeling for alien patterns of human behavior than is nonfiction; it is one stage short of actual experience—and I had only months in which to turn these cowed and ignorant animals into people. I could have offered them psychology and sociology and comparative anthropology; I had such books on hand. But Joe and Llita could not have put them together into a gestalt—and I recall another teacher who used parables in putting over ideas.

They read every hour I would let them, huddled together like puppies and staring at the reading machine and nagging each other about how fast to raise the pages. Usually Llita nagged Joe; she was quicker than he—but as may be, they spurred each other from illiterate to speedreaders in zip time. I didn’t let them have sound-and-picture tapes—I wanted them to
read
.

Couldn’t let ’em spend all their time reading; they had to learn other things—not just salable skills but, much more important, that aggressive self-reliance necessary to a free human—which they totally lacked when I saddled myself with them. Shucks, I wasn’t certain they had the potential; it might have been bred out of their line. But if the spark was in them, I had to find it and fan it into flame—or I would never be able to make them run free.

So I forced them to make up their own minds as much as possible, while being cautiously rough on them in other ways…and greeted every sign of rebellion—silently, in my mind—as a triumphant proof of progress.

I started by teaching Joe to fight—just hand to hand; I didn’t want either of us killed. One compartment was fitted as a gymnasium, with equipment that could be adapted for gee or for free-fall; I used it that hour a day of lowered temperature. Here I worked Joe out. Llita was required to attend but just to exercise—although I had in mind that it might spur Joe along if his sister saw him getting the whey knocked out of him.

Joe needed that spur; he had a terrible time getting it through his head that it was okay to hit or kick
me
, that I wanted him to try, that I would not be angry if he succeeded—but that I
would
be angry if he didn’t try his darnedest.

Took a while. At first he wouldn’t chop at me no matter how wide open I left myself…and when I got him past that, calling him names and taunting him, he still hesitated that split second that let me close and chop him instead.

But one afternoon he got the idea so well that he landed a good one on me and I hardly had to hold back to let him land it. After supper he got his reward: permission to read a
bound
book, one with pages, him dressed in a pair of my surgical gloves and warned that I would clobber him if he got it dirty or tore a page. Llita wasn’t permitted to touch it; this was
his
prize. She sulked and didn’t even want to use the reading machine—until he asked if it was all right for him to read aloud to her.

I ruled that she could even read it with him—as long as she didn’t touch it. So she snuggled up close, head by his, happy again, and started bossing him about turning the pages.

The next day she asked me why
she
could not learn to fight, too?

No doubt she was finding solo exercise a bore—I always found it so and did it only because it was needful to stay in shape—no telling what hazards next groundfall might bring. Minerva, I’ve never felt that women should have to fight; it is a male’s business to protect females and children. But a female should be
able
to fight because she may have to.

So I agreed, but we had to change the rules. Joe and I had been working out by dockside rules—no rules, that is, save that I didn’t tell him that I planned not to do him any permanent damage and did not intend to let him give me anything worse than bruises. But I never said this—if he could manage it, he was free to gouge out one of my eyes and eat it. I just made damn sure that he didn’t.