Cities in Flight

“I wish we could talk to them better.”

“Miramon can talk to us well enough,” Web said somnolently. “He didn’t have to learn our language the hard way, either. They do it here by machine, like we used to do it when we were Okies. I wish we still did it that way.”

“Hypnopaedia?” Estelle said. “But I thought that was all dead and done for. You didn’t really learn anything that way; just facts.”

“That’s right, just facts. It didn’t teach you to relate. For that you have to have a tutor. But it was good for learning things like 1 × 1 = 10, or the tables in the back of the book, or the 850 words you most need to know in a new language. It used to take only five hundred hours to cram all that stuff into you, by EEG feedback, flicker, oral repetition, and I don’t know what all else—and the whole time, you were under hypnosis.”

“It sounds too easy,” Estelle said sleepily.

“The easy parts of things ought to be easy,” Web said. “What’s the point of having to learn them by rote? That takes too much time. You know yourself that something you can learn in ten repetitions, or five, it takes some kids thirty repetitions to learn. So you have to sit around through twenty or twenty-five repetitions that you don’t need. If there’s anything I hate about school, it’s drill—all that time wasted that you could actually be doing something with.”

Suddenly Web became conscious of a peculiar flopping sound at the crest of the hill behind him. He knew well enough that there were no dangerous animals left on He, but he realized that he had been hearing the sound for some time while he was talking; and the notion occurred to him that his definition of a dangerous animal might not necessarily make a good match with that of a Hevian. Anyhow, he could hope; he could use a tiger to best, along about now. He twisted quickly to his hands and knees.

“Don’t be silly,” Estelle said, without moving or even opening her eyes. “It’s only Ernest.”

The svengali appeared over the crest of the hill and came humping itself through the tall grass in a symphony of desperate disorganization. It gave Web only the briefest of glances, and then bent upon Estelle the reproachful stare of an animal utterly betrayed, but still—it hoped you noticed—firm in the true faith. Web stifled his impulse to laugh, for in fact he could hardly blame the poor creature; since it was as brainless as it was sexless—despite its name—it had been able to contrive no better way of keeping up with Estelle than to follow her through her every move in the Matrix game, a discipline for which it was so magnificently unequipped that it had only just now finished. It was lucky that the children had not counted it as a player, or poor Ernest would have been It to—Web thought with unfocussed uneasiness—the end of time.

“We could sign up for it here,” Web said abruptly.

“For what? Hypnopaedia? Your grandmother wouldn’t let us.”

Web turned around and sat up, plucking a long hollow blade of the bamboo-like grass and sinking his grinding teeth thoughtfully into the woody butt end. “But she isn’t here,” he said.

“No, but she will be,” Estelle said. “And she’s a school officer on New Earth. I used to hear her fighting about it with my father when I was a child. She used to tell him he was out of his mind. She would say, ‘Why do kids need all this calculus and history now? What good is it to somebody who’s going to have to go out and hoe a virgin planet?’ She used to make poor Dad stutter something awful.”

“But she isn’t here,” Web repeated, with a little unwilling exasperation. He had just realized that Estelle’s face with its closed eyes, so perfectly in repose in the blue-white light of this one-day-long summer, was lovelier than anything he had ever seen before. He found that he could not go on.

At the same moment, the svengali felt rested enough to take a consensus among the scattered ganglia which served it, however badly, for a brain, and concluded that its long soulful stare at Estelle was doing it no good at all. Simultaneously one of its limbs, which had the whole time been inching in the direction of one of the melon rinds, suddenly passed a threshold and telegraphed back to the rest of the animal the implications of that now faint spicy odor. All the rest of Ernest flowed eagerly into that arm and bunched itself around the rind; and then the polyp was rolling helplessly down the hill, curled into a ball, with the melon rind clutched firmly in the middle. As it rolled, it emitted a small thrilling whistle of alarm which made Web’s back hairs stir—it was the first time he had ever heard a svengali make a sound—but it would not let go of its prize; it came to rest in the middle of a rivulet in the valley, and was washed gently downstream out of sight, still faintly protesting and avidly digesting.

“There goes Ernest,” Web said.