Woman on the Edge of Time

Jackrabbit’s workshop stood near the mill, near enough to hear the wheel turning. There the river ground grains and corn and operated a series of pumps. Four times a day a tidal clock swung the wheel mechanism about so that it was always fixed correctly in the flow of waters. When Jackrabbit did not opaque the window and use only the sliding skylight, ripples danced on his high ceiling. Always, he told her, he could hear the mill wheel, the waves slapping the shore just underneath. The workshop was built out some feet over the river, and the side facing the water had a narrow porch.

“Jackrabbit already has two students,” Luciente said, leaning on the railing outside the open door while Connie looked through the drawings and prints Jackrabbit started to show her next.

“Deborah and Orion aren’t pleased I’m going on defense. They’ve been slinging about it all week,” Jackrabbit complained, knotting his hand in his curly hair.

“Rough!” Luciente said flatly. “They knew when they chose you you hadn’t fulfilled defense. They didn’t have to wait for you as teacher. Let them do service work for sixmonth.”

“Their slinging saddens me,” Jackrabbit said, idly trying to tickle Connie in the ribs as she turned over the stiff sheets. “Rhythm of my life crosscutting rhythms of theirs. They feel they’re growing and want to fly faster.”

“Can’t you work alone? You didn’t always study with a teacher.” Luciente kicked off her shoes and sat with her bare feet hanging off the porch, but she could not quite reach the water.

“Why do you have to go on defense?” Connie turned from the pages. “I can’t look anymore. I’m sorry–I just can’t take more in.”

“But I have to get defending out of the way before I start mothering. It’d be stupid to do it the other way, I grasp that.”

“Your society doesn’t think that much of art and artists and all that, do you?” Connie looked away from the radiant male nude that hung on the far wall, along with twenty other paintings, drawings, prints, whatever. A naked male body hung like that–doubly hung–embarrassed her. It did not seem like something she should stare at, yet the colors glowed, the flesh shone from within. She kept glancing at it, nervously, from the corner of her eye. It was beautiful when it should not have been–like Martin, her first husband. She could not imagine him permitting anyone to paint him that way, yet if someone with talent had, his flesh would have shone so. It was neither Jackrabbit nor Bolivar. Unless Bolivar seven years younger with a bushy beard?

Luciente turned, propped her back against a post of the railing. “Why do you say that, Connie love? The great majority of us pursue some art, and sometimes more than one.”

“But that’s like amateur stuff. I mean, real artists. Like Jackrabbit. I don’t know anything, but I can see it’s for real. Yet he still has to work in the fields and go to the army and cook and all that.”

Luciente grinned “But I myself am a real geneticist and I have to defend and dig potatoes and cook and all that. I also eat and make political choices and rely on those in arms to defend me–as does Jackrabbit. Zo?”

“I comprend,” Jackrabbit said with an airy wave. “In Connie’s time it was thought some people who were good at some things, like a couple of the arts and sciences, should do nothing else.”

“That must have made them a little stupid,” Luciente said. “A little simple–you grasp? And self‑important!”

“Such people tended to feel that other work demeaned their physics or sculpture or whatever. Isn’t that so, Connie?” He ran his fingers along her arm caressingly.

She pulled her arm away, embarrassed again. “Well, if a person can do something … important, why should they chop onions and pick caterpillars off tomato plants?”

“Eating isn’t important?” Luciente scowled with amazement.

“Connie, we think art isproduction. We think making a painting is as real as growing a peach or making diving gear. No more real, no less real. It’s useful and good on a different level, but it’s production. If that’s the work I want to do, I don’t have to pass a test or find a patron. But I still have family duties, political duties, social duties, like every other lug. How not?”

“Everybody? What about Bolivar? He’s always traveling.”

“Bolivar does it all in a couple of lumps. At spring planting, person does the year’s quota and then some! Does two solid weeks of preserving in August or September.”

“But going on defense–isn’t it dangerous?”