Текст книги "Woman on the Edge of Time"

Автор книги: Marge Piercy

Соавторы: Marge Piercy
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“White Oak, you graze me,” Luciente said. “How can you say it’s my belly?”

“Person has a good belly,” Jackrabbit said. “I like good round bellies. Like yours, White Oak.”

They were flirting right in front of Luciente and nobody seemed to care. White Oak must have been twenty‑five years older than Jackrabbit, although they were so athletic it was hard to tell for sure. White Oak’s hair was abundant and worn loose, but she had a network of deep laugh lines around her eyes and mouth.

White Oak’s kenner made a noise. “Here I am, White Oak,” she said to it.

“Zo, are we running to crack the new test today or not?” A sharp voice rose from her wrist. “We’re limping with Bee off till three and Luciente off till who knows when.”

“Flying.” White Oak sighed. “Since coordinating this six, Corydora watches the clock as if it could couple with per!”

“No slinging mates. Corydora’s doing a good job,” Luciente said. “Even if person does try to hand me guilt on a plate about being called up for the time proj. Too bad you lugs have to stiff it twice as hard.” She made a mock‑pious face.

“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 sureLuci 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 would be solved, anyhow!”

“But Connie, some problems you solveonly if you stop being human, become metal, plastic, robot computer. Is dying itself a problem!”Luciente got up to cast a last, lingering glance at the river. “Come. Bee prompted I show you the children’s house.”

“I can’t resist that! A house for kids?” Her legs felt heavy. Suddenly she was slipping back into her drugged real body in real time. A surge of sadness flowed through her hips and belly. Worse, finally, than never to be loved again was never to hold a child next to her body. Her child. Her flesh. She felt a slackening through her, that beginning to slip out of her connection with Luciente, back to the asylum. For an instant she breathed the stifling heat of the closed isolation room, she smelled its stale fecal smell, its smell of caged and fearful bodies. She fought like a swimmer going down. She cast a soundless appeal toward Luciente: Help me! For a long nauseated moment she blurred over and she was no place, lost, terrified.

SEVEN

Jackrabbit was towering over her, lifting her to her feet. His thin face furrowed with serious intent. He held her against him, supporting her in a close hug with one long bony arm while the other hand gently stroked her hair back from her forehead. “Don’t sadden. Little Pepper and Salt, don’t fade on us.” Her face was level with his unbuttoned work shirt, his tanned chest prickly with brass hairs, and his voice burred through the skin into her. “We’d be stupid not to sense you’re confined wrongly. That you hurt and sadden there and no one seems to want to help you heal. That you’re fed drugs that wound your body. Enjoy us. Don’t fade from old pain and return to present pain. Guest here awhile.”

Unmistakably, as his voice burred against her and his hand kneaded her neck, urging her to relax, she felt the rise of his erection, his hardening against her. She tried to wriggle free, and he at once released her.

“I catch sexually.” He shrugged. “Don’t upset more. Truly I meant to calm you.”

“Doesn’t he drive you crazy with jealousy? Why do you let him act this way?” she asked Luciente, who was trying to control a giggling fit.

“Jackrabbit means it–person was trying to comfort you. But person wants to couple with everybody.”

“Aw, not everybody.Not allof the time.”

“Just most of the people most of the time.” Luciente put one arm through hers and one through Jackrabbit’s. “To the children’s house.”

When was a pass not a pass? When did nineteen‑year‑old artists throw their arms around women twice their age from the loony bin? Little Pepper and Salt: what a thing to call her, meaning her hair with the white streak along the part growing out raggedy. That reminded her too of her Texas family, for they would give each other blunt nicknames like One Arm and Old Dimwit. Anglos thought that cruel, and she had come to accept the judgment and to expect a veneer of polite refusal to admit seeing.

“Don’t you people ever have to work?” she asked irritably. They were passing greenhouses set into the earth, the sound of falling water. “All those adults taking off to watch a twelve‑year‑old go for a ride. You all have a maсana attitude for real.”

“We have high production!” Luciente’s black eyes glinted indignation. “Mouth‑of‑Mattapoisett exports protein in flounder, herring, alewives, turtles, geese, ducks, our own blue cheese. We manufacture goose‑down jackets, comforters and pillows. We’re the plant‑breeding center for this whole sector in squash, cucumbers, beans, and corn. We build jizers, diving equipment, and the best nets this side of Orleans, on the Cape. On top we export beautiful poems, artwork, holies, rituals, and a new style of cooking turtle soups and stews!”

“Why isn’t anybody in a hurry? Why are the kids always underfoot? How can you waste so much time talking?”

Jackrabbit waved his arms windmill fashion. “How many hours does it take to grow food and make useful objects? Beyond that we care for our brooder, cook in our fooder, care for animals, do basic routines like cleaning, politic and meet That leaves hours to talk, to study, to play, to love, to enjoy the river.”

“At spring planting, at harvest, when storms come, when some crisis strikes, Connie, we work, we stiff it till we drop … . The old folks story about how they used to have to stiff it all the time. How long the struggle was to turn things over and change them. After, what a mess the whole ying‑and‑yan of it was from peak to sea.” Luciente waved off into the distance. “Now we don’t have to comp ourselves that hard in ordintime … . Grasp, after we dumped the jobs telling people what to do, counting money and moving it about, making people do what they don’t want or bashing them for doing what they want, we have lots of people to work. Kids work, old folks work, women and men work. We put a lot of work into feeding everybody without destroying the soil, keeping up its health and fertility. With most everybody at it part time, nobody breaks their back and grubs dawn to dust like old‑time farmers … . Instance, in March I might work sixteen hours. In December, four …”

“You said you made jizers, comforters. Where are the factories?”

“We just passed the pillow and comforter factory.”

“Can I see it?” When she met Eddie, she had been working in a loft where many Spanish‑speaking women sewed children’s clothes.

Jackrabbit bounded ahead and the door opened. Inside the opaque peach cube, she saw no one. The machinery made the most noise she had heard in the village. “Is this all automated?” she shouted.

“Fasure,” Jackrabbit shouted back. “Who wants to stuff pillows? I tore one open once hitting Bolivar over the head. What a mess! Gets up your nose. And the padded jackets with down–they’re very warm but who would want to stuff every patch?”

“They’re stuffed first, then sewn,” she said. “So nobody works in this factory? Not even a supervisor?”

“It’s mechanical,” Luciente said. “The analyzer oversees it, with constant monitoring and feedback. In operations like the brooder, most everything is automated, but we need human presence because mistakes are too serious.”

“This runs off solar energy?”

“No, methane gas from composting wastes.”

“Okay, you can automate a whole factory,” she said as they walked back into the sunshine. “So why do I see people grubbing around broccoli plants picking off caterpillars? Why is everybody running around on foot or bicycles?”

“We have so much energy from the sun, so much from wind, so much from decomposing wastes, so much from the waves, so much from the river, so much from alcohol from wood, so much from wood gas.” Luciente checked them off on her fingers. “That’s a fixed amount. Manufacturing and mining are better done by machines. Who wants to go deep into the earth and crawl through tunnels breathing rock dust and never seeing the sun? Who wants to sit in a factory sewing the same four or five comforter patterns?”

“There are ten, in fact,” Jackrabbit said. “I counted them.”

“Only you have been in enough beds to be sure,” Luciente said with a tucked‑in smile. They walked on toward a joined group of free‑form buildings of sinuous curves suggesting a mass of eggs, but with long loops thrown off and high arches and arcades. This just‑grew was the color of terra cotta. A vine ran all over the south side, with big velvet flowers that gave off a fragrance of cloves. Bird feeders hung from every protrusion, out of windows, on posts. The roof was studded with bird‑houses and a pigeon coop built in, as if the masonry broke into lace through which pigeons went fluttering and cooing.

Small gardens ran right among the clump of buildings, vegetables and flowers intermixed, tomato plants growing with rosebushes and onions, pansies and bean plants. Some were planted in open borders and some were surrounded by a thin shimmery fence like spiderweb. Out over the bay a towering mass of gray clouds was forming as the wind rose.

“Smells like rain,” Jackrabbit said. “The day’s turning.”

“I hope if it’s going to rain, Innocente has time to complete a shelter.” Luciente eyed the clouds. “Hope Bee and Otter get back before the storm. Lux too, I mean,” she added guiltily.

“When I was on my naming, it rained every damned day,” Jackrabbit said. “I should have come back Drowned Rat.”

In one of the spiderweb gardens an old man with a bush of white hair and a gnarled face, arms like driftwood scoured by salt and wind, was picking peas into a basket and weeding into another, with two kids of nine or ten working on either side.

“How come they aren’t in school?” she asked. “Is school out already for the summer?”

“That isschool,” Luciente said, drawing Connie nearer to them.

“This one is lamb’s‑quarters, no?” one kid was asking.

“Can you eat it?”

“Fasure.”

“Look at the shape of the pea flowers. Most legumes have irregular flowers with five petals–see, the two lower ones join in a keel, like the keel on the fishing boats. The two at the sides are like spread wings. Then you have one on top. Most legumes have leaves like these.”

“Alternate. Compound. With these twisty things that hold on?”

“Tendrils. Some have thorns instead. After we’re done weeding, we’ll look for a tree that’s evolved in a typical legume way, that has thorns a couple of inches long.” His fingers showed the size.

As they strolled on, she said, “But they can’t possibly learn as much that way as they would in a classroom with a book!”

“They can read. We all read by four or so,” Jackrabbit said. “But who wants to grow up with a head full of facts in boxes? We never leave school and go to work. We’re always working, always studying. We think, what person thinks person knows has to be tried out all the time. Placed against what people need. We care a lot howthings are done.”

“Every seven years you get a sabbatical,” Luciente said. “You’re off production for a year and all you’re liable for is family stuff. Some go study in their field. Some learn a language or travel. Hermit in the wilderness. Pursue some line of private research. Or paint. Or write a book.”

Connie had been craning her head around. “I see a lot of old people here. Is this building like an old folks’ home too?”

Outside on the first lawn of grass she had seen here, a circle of small children sat crowding around an old woman with her hair in braids and the face of a defiant eagle. In spite of her age she still had some teeth–they were too yellowed and irregular to be dentures–and she was telling a story in a high quavering dramatic voice. “Then Green Fire came to Box Turtle and when Box Turtle saw, Box Turtle closed per box tight with a hissing of air.” Her ancient brown claw hands became the turtle closing. “Green Fire sat down quietly, tucking per feet under, and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally Box Turtle slowly opened the shell a little peek and peered out.”

“When I was little, that was my favorite story,” Jackrabbit said. “I imagined when I was twelve I would take that name, Green Fire.”

“Box Turtle’s little leathery head stuck out of the shell and per little red eyes stared at Green Fire. ‘What do you want, long‑legged one?’ asked Box Turtle.

“‘I want to learn to hide as you do,’ Green Fire said.

“‘Hiding is easy when you know how,’ said Box Turtle. ‘But first you must trade me your long legs that run so fast, before you can learn to hide the way I do.’”

“Sappho perself made that tale long ago.” Jackrabbit was watching the old woman with admiration. “Many people now tell that story, but none better. At Icebreaking I taped per telling with the latest varia for the holifile. Sappho’s tales have great strength and radiance.”

Luciente snapped her fingers. “We never answered your question.” They passed under an archway into a room full of books on shelves, screens set into alcoves, displays and cameras and sound equipment and art supplies. A dozen kids were busy in the room. An old man–or perhaps woman–with the wiry, brittle body of spry old age was showing a small child how to work television sets that spewed reams of paper at the touch of a dial. Jackrabbit ambled off to see what some kids were doing, working on a small holi projector. Luciente stayed at her side, saying, “We believe old people and children are kin. There’s more space at both ends of life. That closeness to birth and to death makes a common concern with big questions and basic patterns. We think old people, because of their distance from the problems of their own growing up, hold more patience and can be quieter to hear what children want. Not everyone who teaches the young is old–we all teach. The kids work with us. We try to share what we have learned and what we don’t know … . I think maybe growing up is less mysterious with us since the adult world isn’t separate. What better place to learn anatomy than in a clinic? What better place to learn botany than a field of corn? What better place to study mechanics than a repair shop?”

“How can Red Star repair a floater with a mob of kids underfoot?”

“A mob of kids?” Luciente shook her hair back roughly. “I puzzle, I admit … . We think about kids so different it makes us crosstalk, my friend … . We ask a lot of our kids but … politely? It’s not the one‑to‑one bind you had with your daughter, from what you say. We have more space, more people to love us. We grow up closest to our mothers, but we swim close to all our mems–or some, at least!” Luciente grinned. “We have handfriends and pillowfriends among other children in the children’s house … . It’s hard for me to inknow what it would feel like to love only oneand have only onesoul to love me.”

Wandering through the rooms, she found some low‑ceilinged, some opening into fisheye windows, into greenhouses and porches. Some rooms crept into nooks and crannies, small staircases. Others led them to courts full of plants, delicate apparatus, sundials and water clocks, star maps and telescopes. A fountain gurgled. In it three naked children waded with a curly puppy. Birds hopped in the vines, carp lazed in a small stream that flowed through a room whirring with machines into a courtyard, where a construction project was going on with children of seven or eight wielding miniature hammers, planes, and saws.

In a dark room that smelled fresh and cool, a naked girl was listening to what she said shortly was a Bach sonata for unaccompanied flute. How … fancy it was in here. Room where the walls were mosaics of old bottles. Room of stark white blocks with rude mats on the floor. Room where a thin film of gauze like those spidery fences was all that separated inside and outside. Everywhere children went about their play and their business with adults, with older and younger children, with dogs, with rabbits, children with what Luciente told her were powerful microscopes, spectroscopes, molecular scanners, gene readers, computer terminals, light pencils, lightweight sound and light holi cameras and transmitters that created an image so real she could not believe till she passed her hand through that the elephant in the center of the room was only a three‑dimensional image. She walked through the elephant unable to prevent her heart from racing as it raised its huge tusked head and trumpeted.

“You think because we do not bear live, we cannot love our children,” Luciente said in a soft, husky voice, cupping Connie’s elbow in her big calloused hand. “But we do, with whole hearts.”

The nursery: round high room on the ground floor, room with a circle of windows and a small floating dome in the ceiling; here babies babbled, cried, spat, cooed. A young person in a long green loose gown slit up the sides to the thighs sat barefoot, playing a stringed instrument and singing in a sweet alto, and with a treadle board rocking a brace of cradles. A child was playing with one of the babies, tickling and making faces. The infants lay in low cradles with slatted sides that moved on runners to and fro. Connie counted five babies, including one yelling its lungs out, and then three empty cradles, also rocking.

Barbarossa burst in, out of breath. “I hear you, I hear you. You almost blew the kenner off my wrist, you rascal! What a pair of lungs.” He picked up the crying baby. “They can hear you ten miles out on the shelf farm, you hairy little beast!” He sat down with the baby on a soft padded bench by the windows and unbuttoned his shirt. Then she felt sick.

He had breasts. Not large ones. Small breasts, like a flat‑chested woman temporarily swollen with milk. Then with his red beard, his face of a sunburnt forty‑five‑year‑old man, stern‑visaged, long‑nosed, thin‑lipped, he began to nurse. The baby stopped wailing and begun to suck greedily. An expression of serene enjoyment spread over Barbarossa’s intellectual schoolmaster’s face. He let go of the room, of everything, and floated. Her breasts ached with remembrance. She had loved breastfeeding–that deep‑down warm milky connection that seemed to start in her womb and spread up through her trunk into her full dark‑nippled breasts. Her heavy breasts opened to Angelina’s flower face, the sweet sunflower cradled in her arm. She had been borne on the currents of that intimate sensual connection, calmer, gentler than making love but just as enormous and satisfying. She had nursed Angelina until Eddie had absolutely insisted that she stop; for eight months she had nursed her. Angie had been a fat healthy baby. Only after Eddie had made her stop breast‑feeding had Angie turned cranky about eating and become the thin doelike child of the photographs.

She felt angry. Yes, how dare any man share that pleasure. These women thought they had won, but they had abandoned to men the last refuge of women. What was special about being a woman here? They had given it all up, they had let men steal from them the last remnants of ancient power, those sealed in blood and in milk.

“I suppose you do it all with hormones,” she said testily.

“At least two of the three mothers agree to breast‑feed. The way we do it, no one has enough alone, but two or three together share breast‑feeding.”

“Why bother? Don’t tell me you couldn’t make formula?”

“But the intimacy of it! We suspect loving and sensual enjoyment are rooted in being held and sucking and cuddling.”

“Where are the babies from the empty cradles? Are they sick?”

“Outside with mothers or somebody! Oftentimes when we’re working, we take the baby in a backpack. They get fresh air. When breast‑feeding ends, everybody who feels like it lugs them around.”

“Suppose you took Barbarossa’s baby and he wanted it. Wouldn’t he get sore?”

“What are kenners for? You ask.”

She stared at the room, blue and lemon and grass green. Sunlight melted through the circle of windows and a muted vegetable light passed through the dome. The windows stood open to the breezes now. The person in green was changing a diaper and wiping the cradle. Both diaper and wipe‑up went down a chute.

“Well, at least you’re not so crazy about ecology that you wash diapers.”

“They’re made from cornhusks and cobs, and they compost. Very soft. Feel.” The diapers tore off a large roll hung from a stand in the form of a snake dancing, with many tinkling bells attached. Over the cradles mobiles turned and twittered. No pink and blue, no Disney animals prancing, no ugly cartoon pigs decked in human clothes. The nursery was airy, soothing, full of rustling and little bells and wind chimes and the sound of the stringed instrument, the cradles rocking. On the window seat, Barbarossa cuddled his baby to his breast, all the stern importance melted from his features. She could almost hate him in the peaceful joy to which he had no natural right; she could almost like him as he opened like a daisy to the baby’s sucking mouth.

The person in green was cuddling the baby just changed and singing a slightly mournful lullaby:

“Nobody knows how it flows as it goes.

Nobody goes

where it rose

where it flows.”

“Where’s Jackrabbit?” Connie asked, realizing that somewhere in the maze of rooms and courtyards he had slipped away.

“Gone to play. This house seduces you.”

“Nobody chose

how it grows

how it flows.

How it grows

how it glows

in the heart of the rose …”

As they went up a broad shallow stairway, that song, plaintive and endless, followed after them.

“Except in the nursery and among the very young, the kids don’t have toys,” she said suddenly.

“Most of what children must learn, they learn by doing. Under five, fasure they need toys to learn coordination, dexterity; they practice tenderness on dolls … . I’m looking for Magdalena.” Casually Luciente flicked her kenner. “Magdalena? Ah, person is coming. Magdalena is unusual. Person does not switch jobs but is permanent head of this house of children. It is per calling. Sometimes a gift expresses itself so strongly, like Jackrabbit’s need to create color and form, like Magdalena’s need to work with children, that it shapes a life. Person must not do what person cannot do–you have heard us say this a hundred times; but likewise, person must do what person has to do.”

A small figure with velvety black skin–she had to be a woman from the delicacy of her bones–a long neck, hair cut to her scalp in an austere tracery of curls, descended toward them, smiling slightly. She came drifting down, stooping to pick off dead leaves from the vine that grew over one side of the open stairs. She was no taller than a ten‑or eleven‑year‑old.

“Magdalena has no family. Person wants this instead. Person is chaste and solitary among adults,” Luciente said as Magdalena came slowly toward them.

“You mean an old maid?”

“I don’t know this term. You speak it with contempt?”

“Yeah, it’s an insult. A woman who can’t get a man.”

“Connie, we don’t get each other. And we respect people who don’t want to couple. It’s per way: the way for Magdalena.”

In a high chirpy voice like a cricket, Magdalena greeted her. “Be guest, woman from the past.” She stuck out her tiny hand. Her grip was warm, sun‑heated ebony. “I’m Magdalena.”

“You’re the only woman I met here who has a real name. I mean like somebody from my block.”

“It’s the name of a woman burned to death for witchcraft in Germany many centuries ago. A wisewoman who healed with herbs. I saw per in my naming trance.” Magdalena smiled, a blink of ivory in her quick face. Was she sixty? More? Maybe old people here retained an ongoing strength because they felt useful. When she thought of getting old it always made her feel scared and low in her mind, old age as grim as those witch masks kids bought in the candy store and wore in the streets of El Barrio at Halloween.

“I wanted to know about the toys. You have all those gadgets here. Compared to your huts, it’s … fancy. Nice. But I don’t see many toys for the older kids. Can’t you afford to get them toys? I see nobody rich here, but I don’t see anybody poor. I think of how sad it’s been for families like mine who could never give their kids the beautiful dolls with real hair, the sleds, the bikes and racing cars they see advertised. If I had a house of children, I’d give them every toy in the world! I wouldn’t hold nothingback!”

Magdalena touched her on the cheek. “They play farming and cooking and repair and fishing and diving and manufacture and plant breeding and baby tending. When children aren’t kept out of the real work, they don’t have the same need for imitation things. I have studied about the care of children in earlier ages, so I understand more than Luciente what you’re talking about. In that time, Luciente, they had many toys for teaching sex roles to children. Children were kept in separate buildings all day and even after puberty were not supposed to begin full lives.”

Slowly they descended the broad stairs to the bottom and moved off along an arcade. As they turned a corner, in a little nook that was both bower and bench, a rampant twining vine of wisteria ancient and knotted like muscles held in its protective grasp a curved wooden bench that was a lovely size for curling up and napping or reading, for sitting and feeling sorry for oneself, for daydreaming, for imagining voyages and adventures, for whispering secrets to a best friend. There two children, a boy and a girl six or seven, had hung their light summer tunics on the vine like flags and they were seriously engaged in an attempt to have sex together. It did not look like an attempt that would prove immediately successful, but it was one into which they were putting great effort.

The girl gave them a quick indignant glare. Magdalena pulled Connie away by the arm, Luciente having withdrawn even more quickly. As Magdalena dragged her away, Connie asked, “Aren’t you going to stop them?”

Magdalena dropped her arm and began to laugh and although Luciente tried for a moment to keep a straight face she began to laugh with her. Connie stopped, furious. “They’re babies! If they were … playing with knives you’d stop them. What’s wrong with you?”

Magdalena shook her head in wonder. “They learn how to use knives … . Mostly they learn sex from each other. If a child has trouble, we try to heal, to help, but–”