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“Fasure we wouldn’t pick that person because of political reasons, as I understand the history of your time. Anyone in the hierarchy that made decisions? The Establishment, you called it? I know that, although I’m not a student of your history. Actually I’m a plant geneticist.”
“Staining cells!” Co
“I’m working on a strain of zucchini resistant to a mutant form of borer that can penetrate the fairly heavy stalks bred fifteen years ago.”
“You’re a college graduate?” Maybe he wouldn’t beat or rob her. Just genteel slavery, like Professor Silvester.
“What’s that?”
They stared at each other in mutual confusion. “Where you go to study. To get a degree,” Co
“A degree of heat? No … as a hierarchial society, you have degrees of rank? Like lords and counts?” Luciente looked miserable. “Study I understand. Myself, I studied with Rose of Ithaca!” He paused for her appreciation, then shrugged, a little crestfallen. “Of course the name means nothing to you.”
“Okay, where do you go to study? A college. What do they give you if you happen to finish? A degree.” Co
Luciente leaped up and backed away. “I know what that is! I beg you, put it out. It’s poisonous, don’t you know that?”
Dumbfounded, she stared at him. He seemed terrified, as if she held a bomb, and indeed his hand was fumbling behind him at the locks on the door. Bemused, she stubbed the cigarette out, and after the smoke had cleared, cautiously he approached the table fa
“So you want some cola? Or some coffee maybe? I have no wine. I have no beer. Unless soda scares you too?”
“Nothing, thank you. I ate before I came.” Then he gri
“Some people–like me when I have any money–are good cooks! I could cook you a meal that would make you beg for seconds.”
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, Co
“I never heard such nonsense!” Co
“So that’s a water closet!” Luciente rubbed his scalp, setting his long thick black hair flying. “I can’t believe it! So it’s all true.”
“What’s true? The water comes out of the faucet in the sink. Then you use the toilet and the waste goes away.”
“The garbage? Where does the food waste go?”
“I put it downstairs in cans. Believe me, some people around here just throw it out the window. But why foul your own nest? I could see carrying it downtown and putting it by City Hall, to teach them to improve the garbage pickup. In white neighborhoods, you better believe it, they don’t drown in their garbage. In the summer, how it stinks! There in the white apartments, they have a super who picks up the garbage in the hall. Or else they have a dumbwaiter–that’s a little elevator–and the garbage goes down to the basement, where the super unloads it.”
“The super is the name of the task? The person who does the job of returning the garbage to the earth?”
“He puts it in cans in the street and the city comes and takes it away.”
“And what does the city do with it?”
“They burn it.”
“It’s all true!” Luciente shouted with amazement. More gently he added, “Sometimes I suspect our history is infected with propaganda. Many of my generation and even more of Jackrabbit’s suspect the Age of Greed and Waste to be … crudely overdrawn. But to burn your compost! To pour your shit into the waters others downstream must drink! That fish must live in! Into rivers whose estuaries and marshes are links in the whole offshore food chain! Wait till I tell Bee and Jackrabbit! Nobody’s going to believe this. It all goes to show you can be too smart to see the middle step and fall on your face leaping!”
“All right, smart ass. What do you do with garbage and shit? Send it to the moon?”
“We sent it to the earth. We compost everything compostible. We reuse everything else.”
She frowned. Oh, he had to be putting her on. “Are you talking about … outhouses?”
“Out houses? Houses isolated from others?” Luciente made a despairing face. “We aren’t supposed to bombard you with technology, but this is more than I redded.” He raised his wrist‑watch to his ear to see if it was ticking, his lips moving.
“I mean how it used to be at my Tнo Manuel’s in Texas, for instance. They were too dirt poor to have inside plumbing. They had an outhouse. Flies crawling all over. You sit on a board with a hole in it and it goes down in the ground.”
“That’s the idea in very primitive–I mean rudimentary form. Of course now–I mean in our time–it’s composted centrally for groups of houses, and once it is safe, used in farming.”
“You’re trying to tell me you come from the future? Listen, in fifty years they’ll take their food in pellets and nobody will shit at all!”
“That was tried out late in your century–petrochemical foods. Whopping disaster. Think how people in your time suffered from switching to an overrefined diet–cancer of the colon–”
Co
Luciente shook his head sadly, his expressive dark eyes liquid with sorrow. “I was redded for this, but I can’t find the door to what you’re meaning half the time.” He combed his fingers back through his thick hair. “I worked sixmonth with nine other strong senders. Fasure we’re a mixed dish. A breeder of turkeys, an embryo tester, a shelf diver, a flight dealer, a ritual maker, a minder, a telemetrist, a shield grower and a student of blue whales. Youngest eighteen and oldest sixty‑two. From James Bay to Poughkeepsie, our entire region. We’re called the Manhattan Project–that’s a joke based on a group–”
“I know what the Manhattan Project did,” Co
“It’s a rib, you see, because that was a turning point when technology became itself a threat … . Cause we’re a mobilizing of inknowing resources–mental? We’re the first time travelers fasure–not that I’m actually traveling anyplace!”