Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

In bed, not touching because of the heat; the electricity shortage wouldn’t permit them to run the air conditioners in all of the rooms (they had turned on the ones in Lorna’s and in Derek’s rooms, and the children didn’t know theirs was turned off), Lisa said wistfully, “I used to think that the problems would end when they were grown, you know, no more measles and scraped knees, no more school plays to agonize over, no more pajama parties that would keep everyone awake until morning… I wish those days were back again.”

“I’m worried about her, Lisa. Listen, tomorrow after Derek leaves for the ship and you two are alone, try to find out what you can about this crazy conversion, will you?”

“This must be how Paul’s family felt about it all. When he left home he was Saul, when he returned he was a fiery-eyed Paul.”

“If she had a religious experience anything like that I’d like to know under what conditions….”

“You think he would use LSD, or SNO, or anything like that on youngsters?” Lisa sat straight up in the bed, naked, suddenly shivering in the heat of the room.

“I don’t think so. I think Billy Warren Smith is too cagey to let him try that, but they might have something similar, or… I just don’t know. Get what you can from her.”

Lorna had a copy of an essay she had done about her experience for it writing course, and she gave it to Lisa smiling. “I will turn it over to the Church in the fall. They like testimonials, firsthand reports, and such. I meant to before I left Chicago, but I couldn’t find it. I had packed it away already.” She finished canned peaches, long hoarded for such an occasion, and started on poached eggs and toast. She ate like a field laborer, and weighed a sleek one hundred ten pounds. Since Lisa topped that by only three pounds, there was no envy in her glance, just amusement.

“Don’t they feed you at the mountain camp?”

“Have you ever known any institutional food to be worth eating, Mother? Seriously? The cook is a tall, heavy woman, not fat, just big, broad shoulders and muscles, like that. She has orange hair and it is as straight and hard as… as the string of taffy you get from a spoon when it’s done. You know? It’s brittle. So every morning she has to wrestle with it, get it up and under a cook’s hat somehow. Within an hour it is out again, sticking out this way and that, short sharp ends of hair like a porcupine bristling. Back to the mirror to get it pinned up again. She uses a bushel of hairpins in it, and it won’t stay. So she never has time really to cook. And it’s a shame because the food itself is too good to be wasted by her. Potatoes not quite done, peas soft and mushy, steaks crisp, pork still pink, salad limp and either without dressing, or with something forgotten from the dressing. One day she left out the oil, another time she forgot the vinegar. Or salt. She has a real amnesiac strain when it comes to salt. Either she forgets that she used it already, or she just forgets to add any at all. Anyway we stock up on cheese and apples and things like that for eating in the dorms, and it isn’t too bad.”

But things like that would have had Lorna writing home for rescue as short a time as six months ago, Lisa thought. And here she was cheerful, laughing about it, accepting it happily. Lisa poured coffee for both and sat down to read Lorna’s report of her conversion. Lorna picked up the morning facsimile news and glanced over it without reading. She turned on the kitchen 3D and switched channels for several minutes, again not paying much attention, not interested. Suddenly she asked, “Is my old scooter still in the garage?”

“Of course, why?”

“Maybe I’ll get it out and tinker with it later, go for a ride to see some of the old sights….”

Lisa nodded; she knew Lorna would ride over to visit the temple. She returned to reading the report. She was impressed by Lorna’s writing ability, unsuspected in the past.

“This should be called the Universe-city,” the essay started. “A walled town where we are imprisoned and submitted to daily tortures until we become hollow, ready to be pumped full again. By daily injections of the deadly—through boredom—vaccine of education administered by non-entities, in a shotgun blast at the classes of three hundred, five hundred, one thousand, we become immunized against diseases such as admiration of Yeats, fondness for drama, an eye for art, a natural bent for math or science. Sicknesses all. Education is a duty. Education is a chore that modern youth must face up to for the good of the world. Our world will be saved only through the education of its young. Well, ho, and hum.

“One professor remains to me Professor Blur. I sit so far from the lecture stand that he is only a pale blur atop a dark suit and white shirt neatly split down the front by a black tie that is like a crack in a white board fence. I try sometimes very hard to see through the crack, to see what is on the other side, but I think there is nothing there.

“Another professor is Dr. Arms. He waves them constantly. I close my eyes and bet with myself where they will be when I look again. I seldom win. His arm motions are completely random, there is no pattern. He teaches the Overview of Philosophy class, and his voice has found its level and never rises above, or sinks below it. Philosophy has killed him, only his arms won’t die. I think he has two eyes and a nose and a mouth, but I am not certain.

“And so it goes. I attend class or not. There are tapes of all lectures, of course. If everyone attended class there would be bedlam, and no seats.

“We are not allowed beyond the walls of the city. Out there there are wolves. A wilderness where little girls go forth and are never seen again. There is only authorized traffic on the streets; the wolf packs are on foot, howling up and down the streets from dark until dawn, thirsting for blood from innocents. We are the innocents. But such wise innocents, such experienced innocents. Everything is allowed at Universe-city. All drugs that have boon accepted as harmless, all forms of deviation from sexual mores, the attire that strikes one’s fancy. There is no place to rebel, nothing to rebel about. Anarchist? Permission for the stand from three until four on the ninth of the coming month. And is that satisfactory? Communist? Same stand from one until two on the third. Adherents for everything imaginable are permitted to speak freely, and there is no trouble. Chromosomal manipulation to produce workers? When would you like the stand, sir? The recipe for abortion cocktail has been given out so often that no one even attends those meetings now. We sit up until all hours just trying to find a subject that would be denied so we will have a cause. There isn’t any.

“Of course I attended no church. I never did. I learned the patterns of the walls at the museums and libraries, and I counted the grains of sand at the sponsored beaches. We have movies and dances and the monthly psychedelic reverie to look forward to. But what’s it all for?

“For the first three months I floated high on the excitement. What freedom, what courage all about me, unhampered, unquestioned, the first totally permissive environment I had known. I floated. Then fell with a dull thud. Freedom can be confining. Everything is there for the taking, already paid for, ours to be used, squirreled away, consumed, wasted. It doesn’t matter what we do with it, it’s ours. So we don’t even have the thrill of petty thefts that could relieve the sameness and the boredom.

“The walls that lock the mad world out, and us in, ensuring freedom and safety became the prison walls. We plotted escape. Not only escape, but safe passage through the miles of wolf country. The joy and exhilaration of getting out and through the slums to the Loop! There is nothing to compare to it. The older, more experienced among us told us what to wear, how to talk if we got caught, but best of all, don’t get caught. Girls would get raped repeatedly, maybe cut up a little bit, for boys it would be even worse. Especially if they happened to get caught by a gang of she-wolves.