Woman on the Edge of Time

“Then you work out a sentence. Maybe exile, remote labor. Sheepherding. Life on shipboard. Space service. Sometimes crossers cook good ideas about how to atone. You could put in for an experiment or something dangerous.”

She stared. “You’re telling me that when I smashed Geraldo’s face, I’d tell you what I should do to … atone?”

“How not?” Parra stared back. “You, your victim, and your judge work it out. If you killed, then the family of your victim would choose a mem to negotiate.”

“If I killed a bunch of people, then I’d just sign on as a sailor or herd sheep?”

“You mean a second time? No. Second time someone uses violence, we give up. We don’t want to watch each other or to imprison each other. We aren’t willing to live with people who choose to use violence. We execute them.”

“Suppose I say I didn’t do it.”

“That happens.” Parra waved her hand. “By lot someone is picked to investigate. When that investigator thinks the crosser has been found, we have a trial. Our laws are simple and we don’t need lawyers. The jury decides. A sentence is negotiated by all the parties.”

“You’re Latin, aren’t you?”

“Latin? Ancient language?”

“Spanish-speaking?”

“Sí, from down in Río Grande, Tejas del Sur. Pero hace cinco años que he vivido in el pueblo boricua Lola Rodríguez de Tío.”

“De veras? De Tejas? Yo tambíen. I was born in El Paso. So—pues—en Tejas ahora … Who’s got the power?”

“We’re an autonomous region.” Parra looked a little confused. “Todos, claro, como aquí, como siempre, no?”

“But you all speak Spanish?”

“For our first language, claro que sí, como no?”

“Why are you here? Why did you come up here?”

“To study with María de Lola Rodríguez. Es experta sobre ríos. En mi regíon tenemos todavía problemas terribles con los ríos, que estaban envenedados por completo en tu época. I’ve been studying five years. María says I can go back to my pueblo in a year, para ayudarles. Tengo muchas ganas de volver. I miss my people, ai!, me hacen tanta falta! And the winters burn my teeth.”

“Ojalá pudiera ver Tejas ahora! How I’d like to see Texas now!”

“Por supuesto! It’ll knock your eyes out!” Parra grabbed her by the shoulder. “What we’ve done with adobe in the last forty years—how it glows. We eat plenty of meat too, not like here, where they think one skinny cow makes a fiesta! We have a wonderful system of little clinics everyplace. And in my departamento, we’ve bred many races of vegetables resistant to … a la sequía, to drought. Verdad, you can ask Bee or Luciente … .”

Parra turned to the table and her face stilled. To the room at large she said, “Should we begin again?” She linked her arm through Connie’s and drew her to a chair, squeezing her shoulder as she seated her.

“I feel that Bolivar’s work emphasizes the individualistic, places style over the whole yin-and-yang. When Jackrabbit works with Bolivar, I feel a political thinness in Jackrabbit’s work, never there when person works alone.” Luciente sat with hands folded.

“Such a crit is too general to be useful,” a fat person with a bass voice said. “How can Bolivar respond to such vague slinging?”

“In their recent holi, the image of struggle was a male and a female embracing and fighting at once, which resolved into an image of two androgynes. Yet the force that destroyed so many races of beings, human and animal, was only in its source sexist. Its manifestation was profit-oriented greed.”

“Luciente crits justly,” Barbarossa said. “In truth, I didn’t think of it. But it seems to me the holi should have related the greed and waste to the political and economic systems.”

The old person with the glittery black eyes, Sojourner, shook her head. “Every piece of art can’t contain everything everybody would like to say! I’ve seen this mistake for sixty years. Our culture as a whole must speak the whole truth. But every object can’t! That’s the slogan mentality at work, as if there were certain holy words that must always be named.”

“But do we have to be satisfied with half truths?” Barbarossa asked.

“Sometimes an image radiates many possible truths,” Bolivar said. “Luciente appears to fix too narrowly on content and apply our common politics too rigidly.”

“Our common politics gives running room for disagreement,” Luciente said. “I like to be clear about political distinctions.”

“A powerful image says more than can be listed. It cannot be wholly explained rationally,” Jackrabbit said. “What does a melody mean?”

“Yet a work has gross meaning we can agree or disagree with,” Luciente said.

“Our history isn’t a set of axioms.” Bolivar spoke slowly, firmly. “I guess I see the original division of labor, that first dichotomy, as enabling later divvies into haves and have-nots, powerful and powerless, enjoyers and workers, rapists and victims. The patriarchal mind/body split turned the body to machine and the rest of the universe into booty on which the will could run rampant, using, discarding, destroying.”