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This sort of thing happened in the best of families. They used to shut the strange ones up in attic rooms, or let them rove about the big old country houses. Now, of course, there were drugs and rest homes.
She wondered what excuse would be found when whatever was pla
It had been a mistake to inquire about her students, now long vanished. She knew that her inquiry had been reported where it would do her the most harm, in those carefully lavish offices where her brother and his aides compiled a dossier on Professor and Doctor Winthrop Baker and her troubled state of mind. Did she seem . . . composed when she pressed her police call button? Did she perform her duties in a satisfactory ma
Even her housekeeper had been questioned: Does Professor Baker appear cheerful? Does she keep irregular hours? Has she ever said . . . ? The poor woman had reported the questions and her answers to Wyn. When she realized how her answers might be used, she had broken down in tears, and Wyn had to dose her with her best brandy.
She suspected they would use her as another example of how professors shouldn't interfere in business, much less politics. Probably the excuse would be the usual one for a woman and an intellectual. She was working too hard, poor thing. And then she started poking into business and wasn't up to the stress. What could you expect?
Actually, she figured her brother would try to prove her incompetent. That meant a rest home-a country club with guards for wealthy, neurasthenic, or otherwise inconvenient people. She hoped the one they'd probably park her in would have a decent library. Maybe the tranquilizers wouldn't be too strong, or she could spit them out.
Well, the rest home could just wait. She had one last lecture to give.
Wyn climbed the platform, arranged notes she knew she would not use, and looked out at the students waiting for her to speak. Faces pink and assured, with the familiar chin- or browlines of distant cousins, come to hear lecture or scandal as they absorbed the academic airs and graces suitable for the heirs of rulers.
There were ghosts in the room, too. Floating above empty seats at the back (which were the places they would probably have chosen) were other faces, the olive skin and dark eyes of the students who had vanished because they were Citizens, to be engulfed by BuReloc. What would they have made of Sanders Theatre and this university Wyn had called home for most of her life? Could they see it for the tainted thing it had become?
Her voice rang out over the room with its pine- and sun-scented echoes. Aristocrat speaking with aristocrats, she could invoke references and languages that would have lost and shamed her LAU students. "We have been reared," she told them, "to admire Realpolitik. Consider, for example, the ways of Thomas Hobbes and his Leviathan. But must life, as he formulated it, be 'nasty, brutish, and short' to be considered 'real'? I find it interesting . . ."
There, she had used first person; that ought to bring her students' heads up. They must know: she would be detained today, taken away, whatever euphemisms they chose. No wonder Sanders had filled the way it did when elder professors were retiring.
". . . that Hobbes chose to translate Thucydides's Pelopo
"I ca
She could see the smiles, evoked by her mention of the California riot that had brought her back prematurely to the East Coast, altering to nods of approval. "We are used to agreeing wisely with such statements. To disagree, these days, marks us as naive, foolish, sentimental, especially those of us who plan to enter the more active fields of law and commerce. And yet, to have these words spoken by a people who had earlier declared that they honored the law and they honored the law that was above the law is to hear a chilling moral progression. Or, as I see it, a moral deterioration.
"As students, we are not just entitled to make such judgments." She paused.
"We are required." Shock on those scrubbed, smug faces. Had she ever looked so sure, so jolted out of her composure? Memory shocked her: the day before the riot.
Disappointed at hearing ethics when they had hoped for scandal, her class was glazing out again. Perhaps only a riot outside the windows would convince them of what she had seen. But no such riot would taint the Yard if she could help it. More than enough blood had been shed on any campus.
"Why, you goin' back there if you knows they go
And maybe, just maybe, she was theirs.
It had been strange at first to teach basic reading rather than Linear B or Homer. It had been stranger yet to make home visits to grandmothers younger than herself but pregnant once again. And strangest of all to find herself learning more from them than they could from her.
Abandoning generations of "keep it in the family," she had asked their advice; and they had warned her. "They'd never do that!" she had protested to faces, black, white, and brown, old and young, all wizened from the same street wisdom and the street fights that erupted when that wisdom failed.
Was she expecting trouble? What kind? Given tough licensing laws and the penalties for illegal weapons, she'd better not pack a weapon. So her bookbag held books and papers, nothing more dangerous. A first-aid kit rode in one pocket. She had even sewn some simple jewelry and coins into the seams of her bag. With luck, the nurses in whatever rest home she was bound for could be bribed.
"You're pushing it, Wyn. I'm warning you." Sure enough, Wyn could hear the minatory singsong in her brother's voice. For years, it had been second nature in the family to yield to him when his face turned red, and he waved his finger at her as no teacher beyond the elementary grades had the ill-grace to do.
She had held the statement out to him, the statement of her holdings and the records she had found. Saying nothing. Letting the record speak for itself.
"So, you're mowing the whistle? Do you want to disgrace us all?"