Woman on the Edge of Time

By the time Connie finished her nibbling, almost everyone had drifted out of the fooder, and they followed after. In the tall trees outside the children’s house many swings had been put up, conventional, one-person swings, trapezes, two-and three-person swings like cages, round swings, swings people lay in. From all the swings and trapezes, children and middle-aged people and an old woman with long white hair were hurtling through the air, calling to each other like a forestful of monkeys.

“That’s Tecumseh.” Luciente pointed to a girl hanging by her bare feet on a trapeze, flipping over and over as if her body had no bones. “Tecumseh won a first today in gymnastics. How graceful and fluid person is!”

“How old is she?”

“Sixteen, I think? Tecumseh waited till only a couple of years ago for naming.”

“So you do have sports. You said you taught kids not to compete, but she won a first.”

“But to try to do things well! That’s fun … . A child playing alone will still try to jump higher than that child jumped yesterday, no? We don’t keep back from saluting each other for doing well. We want each other to feel … cherished? … It’s a point of emphasis, no? Maybe always some cooperating, some competing goes on. Instead of competing for a living, for scarce resources, for food, we try to cooperate on all that. Competing is like … decoration. Something that belongs to sports, games, fighting, wrestling, running, racing, poemfests, carnival …”

In the meadow near the floater pad people were playing games that involved contact or a lot of running around or a lot of acting up and yelling. Some were games with things, like soft collapsible swords, pillows that spilled light bubbles when they broke. People were gliding on big wings off the hill by the river, and every so often someone fell in, settling into the water and then swimming to shore as the wings dissolved.

“You make a lot of things that fall apart quickly. They did that in my time also. Called it planned obsolescence.”

“Playthings, flimsies, some pretty things we make for a moment. They’re called butterflies. But objects we make for daily use, we make to last. It would be a pity to use up scarce copper or steel on a machine that worked poorly.”

“Ummmm. Luxury items are made for once only and the necessities to last?”

“Not exactly.” Luciente stopped in front of a glass wall that mirrored them to admire her dress, turning to and fro like a child in a new suit. “Luxuries fall into two categories: circulating and once-only. Look, they’re playing web. There’s Jackrabbit and Bolivar.”

About ten people were playing with long luminous cords, which they fixed somehow at intervals and wove in and out so that a great dully glowing web was created in which people got caught. A box would be built around them before they were aware or could dash out, and then they were apparently a prisoner until embraced and let out when everybody was so trapped but one. Jackrabbit was hopping among the strands, leaving a nimble zigzag wake.

“Circulating luxuries pass through the libraries of each village—beautiful new objects get added and some things wear out or get damaged. Costumes, jewelry, vases, paintings, sculpture—some is always on loan to our village. And always passing on. Some are for personal wearing, at feasts and rituals. Some are for enjoyment in the children’s house, the meetinghouse, the fooder, the labs, the diving gear factory. Outside as we walk around.”

“But you have to give them back. You don’t get to keep anything for yourself! It all belongs to the government?”

“We pass along the pleasure, Pepper and Salt. Think, for my birthday last year I wore a sable cloak like the Queen of the Night. I have worn emeralds and for a month a Michelangelo hung where I could see it every day. All the pleasure I can suck from these things I’ve had and pass on to pleasure others!”

Bolivar was about to be enclosed in a box. Quickly Jackrabbit leaped forward and was sealed in with him. The others laughed and called out. Jackrabbit and Bolivar embraced in the fictitious confines of the cell, the walls of luminous rope. Connie could feel that Luciente was not pleased. Jealousy like a damp wind, she could feel it. She was sad for Luciente. So they did feel jealousy here. Both young men were dressed alike, naked except for knee-length cloaks thrown back. Each had painted on his chest an elaborate flower, Jackrabbit’s a lush peony, Bolivar’s a trumpeting pale lily. Luciente forgot what she had been saying, forgot her bouncy explanations, and her eyes brooded on them twinned in the web, their slender bodies embracing naked under the rippled backs of the cloaks. Bolivar had been Jackrabbit’s lover long before Luciente; Bolivar was older than Jackrabbit but much younger than Luciente, who stood fingering the chiffon of her dress, clumsy before their straight, supple, lithe alikeness, feeling cast out from the luminous web of their play.