Slapstick, Or, Lonesome No More! - Kurt Vonnegut [21]
“Then why did you come?” I asked her.
Her rage came out into the open again. She said this to me with all possible nastiness: “Because money talks, ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy.’”
• • •
We were further shocked when we learned that she meant to administer tests to us separately. We said innocently that we would get many more correct answers if we were allowed to put our heads together.
She became a tower of irony. “Why, of course, Master and Mistress,” she said. “And wouldn’t you like to have an encyclopaedia in the room with you, too, and maybe the faculty of Harvard University, to tell you the answers, in case you’re not sure?”
“That would be nice,” we said.
“In case nobody has told you,” she said, “this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else—where everybody learns to make his or her own way.
“I’m here to test you,” she said, “but there’s a basic rule for life I’d like to teach you, too, and you’ll thank me for it in years to come.”
This was the lesson: “Paddle your own canoe,” she said. “Can you say that and remember it?”
Not only could I say it, but I remember it to this day: “Paddle your own canoe.”
Hi ho.
• • •
So we paddled our own canoes. We were tested as individuals at the stainless steel table in the tile-lined diningroom. When one of us was in there with Dr. Cordiner, with “Aunt Cordelia,” as we came to call her in private, the other one was taken as far away as possible—to the ballroom at the top of the tower at the north end of the mansion.
Withers Witherspoon had the job of watching whichever one of us was in the ballroom. He was chosen for the job because he had been a soldier at one time. We heard “Aunt Cordelia’s” instructions to him. She asked him to be alert to clues that Eliza and I were communicating telepathically.
Western science, with a few clues from the Chinese, had at last acknowledged that some people could communicate with certain others without visible or audible signals. The transmitters and receivers for such spooky messages were on the surfaces of sinus cavities, and those cavities had to be healthy and clear of obstructions.
The chief clue which the Chinese gave the West was this puzzling sentence, delivered in English, which took years to decipher: “I feel so lonesome when I get hay fever or a cold.”
Hi ho.
• • •
Well, mental telepathy was useless to Eliza and me over distances greater than three meters. With one of us in the diningroom, and the other in the ballroom, our bodies might as well have been on different planets—which is in fact their condition today.
Oh, sure—and I could take written examinations, but Eliza could not. When “Aunt Cordelia” tested Eliza, she had to read each question out loud to her, and then write down her answer.
And it seemed to us that we missed absolutely every question. But we must have answered a few correctly, for Dr. Cordiner reported to our parents that our intelligence was “… low normal for their age.”
She said further, not knowing that we were eavesdropping, that Eliza would probably never learn to read or write, and hence could never be a voter or hold a driver’s license. She tried to soften this some by observing that Eliza was “… quite an amusing chatterbox.”
She said that I was “… a good boy, a serious boy—easily distracted by his scatter-brained sister. He reads and writes, but has a poor comprehension of the meanings of words and sentences. If he were separated from his sister, there is every reason to believe that he could become a fillingstation attendant or a janitor in a village school. His prospects for a happy and useful life in a rural area are fair to good.”
• • •
The People’s Republic of China was at that very moment secretly creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses—by teaching pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible specialists to think as single minds.