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"This illegality has done that already," she had retorted. Tactical blunder. She should at least have looked as if she were ready to deal.
She had tried to hire a lawyer the next day-not a Family member. The lawyer had sweated, hedged, gabbled of consequences that made him sweat through his shirt until even the silk of his tie hung limp. Ultimately, however, Baker money-even after it was besmirched by old Put amp; Call-convinced him to accept a retainer. And her instructions. She wondered if he'd stand tough if . . . when . . . she disappeared.
Subpoenas were delivered; the newswires went ghoulish with "need to know" and the implication of famous prey. But "you haven't heard the last!" her brother had promised. The elaborate contra-dance of bail, hearings, and indictments began.
So did the careful, cautious "it's for her own good" of her brother's people's investigation.
Carry money and small valuables. Wyn's Welfare Project friends warned her. Don't stick to fixed habits. Watch yourself.
But what about her life?
"Lucky if you keep it." She had herself seen the boy who had been set on fire when he refused to run borloi; the woman whose boyfriend had slashed her face; the ex-gangmember whose brothers stayed with him, as if on guard-and those were the lucky ones, who got to go on living.
"You stay here. We hide you."
She assured them she was protected, that she played a game circumscribed by law.
"You think? You step on his turf; he get you. You stay here."
She hadn't listened. And she hadn't run. She had no great faith in her ability to hide, in any case. And some bravura notion of being arrested at her work, taken from her classroom had pushed her back from the Welfare Projects to Cambridge and this final lecture.
After all, it was her students in California who had vanished quite literally off the face of the Earth, bound-as she knew now-for interstellar Devil's Islands like Tanith or Haven. They couldn't afford the luxury of grandstanding: she could.
He sayin' you crazy, her friends from Welfare, her students there, had told her. Go
You turn on him!
She never had persuaded them of the difference between crime and revenge, had she? But, assuming he said she was crazy and tried to have her committed, she was hardly the first overprivileged woman to be punished that way for the crime of disagreeing with her family. How bad could a rest home be, after all? She had always meant to ask her aunt Dorothea, who had spent twenty years of her life in and out of them. Old now, and lucid on the days she bothered to stop drinking and dress to come downstairs, Dorothea had watched her as ironically as the women in Mattapan.
No point in thinking of that now. What's done is done.
Where was she in this lecture? That was right. Shake them up a bit with their own weakness. They only think they're safe, prosperous: what if someone stronger comes along and decides to take what they have?
". . . It is a sign of our own deterioration that we need to ask 'who are the weak?' Are they those who live in Welfare Islands, those who have turned their back upon our nation and our world for the dubious loyalties of the CoDominium? Or are they those who do not ask? The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not living. And we have failed to examine our own lives.
"It is thus we who are the weak . . ." Wyn let the statement drop gently into the su
". . . For we have forgotten. And we have forgotten to ask."
She had not forgotten, she protested as she moved into the final section of the class. A century or so ago, there had been a great classicist, a Jew, who had fled Germany. He came to a checkpoint and was stopped by a young soldier who searched his baggage. With the instincts of the hunted, the scholar knew that the soldier recognized him, knew him for a Jew and a fugitive. He waited for the man to lay his hand upon his arm and shout the words that would herald the start of his arrest and death. The soldier indeed spoke. "You have a copy of Horace in your bags, Herr Professor."
And so the professor had spoken of Horace, had lectured, risen on the wings of fear and eloquence till he taught as he had never taught before. And when his mouth dried, his voice broke, and his throat almost closed with weariness, the soldier spoke again. "Danke sch?n, Herr Professor," he said. And stamped his papers and sent him on his way to freedom and to life.
Heads turned to stare out the blurred glass of the theatre's windows. Wyn's head went up. Again, the copper spoor of blood dimmed the air.
"Prowl car," muttered one student to his seatmate. His ruddy face paling. "It's white."
Psicops? No security but Harvard's own ever set foot in the yard. Were they going to make her out to be a dangerous lunatic?
Wyn's belly chilled, and her mouth dried. Her voice went hoarse, but she forced breath up from her diaphragm, and her voice rang out with a strength that surprised her. Could she turn back? she wondered. Even at the last, Antigone had been offered a choice: recant, retreat. She had not-and she had died. Too rigid, people called Antigone these days.
Like Antigone, Wyn had a brother who had betrayed his family. That had to be set right as best she could.
Perhaps Wyn should have been more discreet. She could not have been less foolish. Not when she knew. And she knew other things too: that there was always a payment for knowledge.
Now, she spoke to the kids who would never see this overcivilized room. The faces that she saw only in her imagination-the blackened eyes and bloodied mouths-seemed to relax as she spoke, then fade as if they were ghosts she had assuaged. Then, to faces leached by unaccustomed fear of their confidence, she spoke of the students they would never meet.
"They were dispossessed, you see, being weak; being only Citizens. You say that you are safe, being Taxpayers? Taxpayers you are; Taxpayers we are; and yet I tell you, when a government like that of Athens turns first upon its principles and then upon the people who still espouse them-as if ashamed before them-anyone can become the weak. And in that situation, one may only hope one has the strength to endure. If you take one thing from today's class, I suggest it be this: the Gedankenexperiment . . . Einstein's term, which translates as thought experiment . . . . Assume that you have become 'the weak.' What will you do now?"
Pause to draw a long, much-needed breath and meet the eyes that challenged hers.
"You're quite right, of course. The question cuts both ways. What would I do?"
She looked down into those faces and nodded, a minute bow of conclusion.
"I should hope to be equal to the ordeal."
For a moment, she stood, catching her breath, assembling her papers and stowing them in her bookbag. To her astonishment, the students cheered her as if she were Lilith. Their red, opened mouths reminded her of students in the first riot she had seen and how their mouths bled as they fell.
She forced a smile and a rueful, modest headshake. Then, with a last look around the wooden vaults of the old theater, she slipped out a side door. Memories died as quickly as the echoes of old applause. She wondered who would forget first: her students or the kids from the Welfare Districts.
It took all the strength she had to leave Mem Hall and begin her usual leisurely stroll toward the Yard and her study in Widener Library.
"Professor Baker?" Outsiders, then, not to use a social title. They didn't call her "doctor" either: that would be reserved for medical types. So it was the rest home, was it? And so soon! She turned and eyed the two men and one woman as she might size up freshmen. Their tailoring was good enough to let them pass for Taxpayers, yet loose enough to let them move freely. She wondered if she could outrun them; she was certain it wasn't worth trying.