Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [60]
“Corydora’s your boss?”
“We coordinate by lot,” Luciente explained as White Oak jogged off. “For sixmonth at a time.”
“Why do it that way?” Connie asked. “Some people know how to run a lab, and some people don’t, right?”
“Whenever we decide we’re ripe to join a work base, we fuse as full members. We share the exciting jobs and the dull jobs. We don’t think telling people what to do is a real world skill. Now, joining a base … Some people stay on where they study. Others go away to study and then come home—”
“Place matters to us,” Jackrabbit said. “A sense of land, of village and base and family. We’re strongly rooted. People of your time weren’t? So I’ve been told—lacking Luciente’s time traveling. On per it’s wasted, too. I bet that one talks a blue streak in your century and looks at nothing.”
Connie laughed. “Where I am now, there’s not much to see … . You … went mad a second time?”
“Jackrabbit’s jealous of my assignment. Jackrabbit catches like you, but person transmutes everything! … I always choose catchers!” Luciente frowned at her big strong hands.
“I’m jealous of everybody’s gifts. I want to be everybody and feel everything and do everything. Wherever I am, where I’m not plagues me. As long as I don’t have to get up too early in the morning to do it all.” He stretched languidly. “The second time I was mad, Diana helped me. I’m sure Luci has talked about Diana. At great length.”
“We’re jealous of each other’s past,” Luciente said with sudden gloom. “We’ll have to have a worming someday.”
“I don’t dread a worming, all that attent … . Diana was just emerging from per own journey down, and was more helpful than I can easily say. I only needed twomonth and I came out with a stronger healing than the first.”
“Do you tell everyone you meet that you’ve been mad twice?” She resented his casual, almost boastful air. She lugged that radioactive fact around New York like a hidden sore. To find out she had been in an institution scared people—how it scared them. Not a good risk for a job. They feared madness might prove contagious.
Jackrabbit looked into her eyes with piercing curiosity. “Why not? Why keep that from you any more than studying with Marika?”
“In my time you’d be ashamed … . When people find out, they pull away so fast I can see it. Jerky. Afterward, if they have to deal with me, they’re thinking all the time that I might suddenly go berserk and start climbing the walls or jumping out the window. Or they don’t believe anything I say.”
“People of your time confuse me, for they seem neither strongly inknowing nor strongly outgoing. Except in couples. Unstable dyads, fierce and greedy, trying to body the original mother-child bonding. It looks tragic and blind!”
Luciente said quickly, “I’ve known Connie for some time, and I wouldn’t call per blind. Connie has a high capacity to respond to others. We should not sound arrogant because we have a more evolved society—we came from them, after all!”
“More evolved!” Connie snorted. “I’d say things have gone backward!”
“Our technology did not develop in a straight line from yours,” Luciente said seriously, looking with shining black gaze, merry, alert in a way that cast grace notes around her words. “We have limited resources. We plan cooperatively. We can afford to waste … nothing. You might say our—you’d say religion?—ideas make us see ourselves as partners with water, air, birds, fish, trees.”
“We learned a lot from societies that people used to call primitive. Primitive technically. But socially sophisticated.” Jackrabbit paced, frowning. “We tried to learn from cultures that dealt well with handling conflict, promoting cooperation, coming of age, growing a sense of community, getting sick, aging, going mad, dying—”
“Yeah, and you still go crazy. You still get sick. You grow old. You die. I thought in a hundred and fifty years some of these problems