Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [161]
“It’s beginning to grow out. It kind of itches.” On impulse she took off the tipsy reddish brown wig and showed him her crew cut. She could feel a bald spot at the plug of cement, but the rest of her scalp was growing hair straight up.
Both Bee and Luciente giggled without malice and petted her, exclaiming how stiff and bristly the half-inch hair felt. She did not mind their teasing because it carried affection and besides, she knew how funny she looked. This ward had a real mirror in the bathroom.
Bee clucked over the plug in her scalp. “This can’t be good. What have they in there?”
“Something to control me. A machine.”
Bee looked wasted with sadness, that expression from the beginning of Jackrabbit’s wake. “We’re all at war. You’re a prisoner of war. May you free yourself.” Gently he hugged her.
She laughed shortly, disentangling herself. “How can I?”
“Can I give you tactics?” Bee turned her chin back toward him. “There’s always a thing you can deny an oppressor, if only your allegiance. Your belief. Your cooping. Often even with vastly unequal power, you can find or force an opening to fight back. In your time many without power found ways to fight. Till that became a power.”
“But you’re still fighting. It isn’t over yet!”
“How is it ever over?” Luciente waved a hand. “In time the sun goes nova. Big bang. What else? We renew, regenerate. Or die.”
“But you don’t seem to believe really in more—not more people, more things, or even more money.”
Luciente leaned against a pine, her fingers playing with the ridged bark. “Someday the gross repair will be done. The oceans will be balanced, the rivers flow clean, the wetlands and the forests flourish. There’ll be no more enemies. No Them and Us. We can quarrel joyously with each other about important matters of idea and art. The vestiges of old ways will fade. I can’t know that time—any more than you can ultimately know us. We can only know what we can truly imagine. Finally what we see comes from ourselves.”
“Do you think I don’t know you, Luciente?”
“Grasp, as people. I mean you can’t fully comprend our society, any more than I could one a hundred years past us. What new arts will our great-great-grandchildren invent? What old arts discover? What musical instruments will they build? What games? What inknowing? What new foods, what styles of cooking? What sciences we can’t imagine? What new way of healing? Will they sail far into our galaxy? Travel on the submicroscopic strata? When each region is ownfed, when reparations are completed, what then? Sometimes … sometimes I want to live forever!” Luciente flung back her head. “But I know I’ll find my death ripe. I’ll want to lay my body down, I myself, and be done. But now I’d like to travel forward into that future as you traveled to us. I know there’s no real point to it Now suffices. Yet I’m very glad to be knowing you, Connie.”
A strange high whistling came through the air, nearer and nearer. Bee and Luciente froze; then they motioned to her and began trotting swiftly in the direction Bee had just come from.
“Fast! Run!” Luciente mouthed at her over her shoulder. Bee dropped back to urge her forward as they ran.
The high penetrating screech grew louder and louder still. It bored through her ears and seemed to whine round and round in her skull. Pain like a drill sang in her marrow. No longer did the pain seem to enter only through her ears; her bones seemed to vibrate at a pitch too high to bear. She was a tuning fork shivering in pain.
“Run, Connie! Run!” Bee urged. “Sonic sweeps kill. The reflectors are over the bridge. Run!”
She tried to keep up, but she could not run as fast. Panting, her sides stabbing, she fell farther and farther behind. They paused to wait Luciente ran back to drag her along. The high drill of the whining shook her. She crumpled to the ground, clawing at her head. “Go on! Save yourself!”
“There. Her eyelids fluttered. She’s coming out of it”
She opened her eyes. The nurse stood over her. An aide bustled off with a message.