Fish Tails (8 page)

Gralf had fully intended to get rid of Needly by selling her, but no boy with any pride would do girl's work, and if Needly was gone, Grandma likely wouldn't stay. So there'd be three men in the house and nobody to do for them but Trudis, and she wouldn't!

Unless! Unless he could buy a girl for Grudge or Slap, and that brought him back to Grandma Healer's pennies. Grandma, now she was back, would still be doing what she used to do, and he could probably lay hands on what ­people paid her, so he'd let her get into the habit of doin' it all again. Though Grandma could read what passed for thought in Gralf's mind as though it were printed on his forehead, the last thing she would have suspected to find there was money that she, Lillis, was supposed to have. Until, that is, one day when the pennies loomed so large in Gralf's mind that he told her he'd be taking what she was paid in future.

She could not keep the laughter inside her. So that's what the fool had been thinking of. “Well, Gralf,” she said. “You're welcome to everything I get, but you'll have to come along with me each time to get it. The most I get from anybody is a mug of tea, and some days I almost drown in it! But I can't carry it home; you'll have to be right there to get any.”

Grandma said Gralf never let Trudis have any money. Why would he think any other man would let a woman have money to pay for a healer? Gralf heard her say it. He went around hitting things for several frustrated days. He would have preferred to hit the old woman, but there was that
jitchus
thing! Kill an old woman who might be a witch, and it'd
jitchus
!

Needly herself remained blessedly ignorant of either Gralf or Grandma's thoughts. Thus far she was merely wary, as all Hench Valley females were when any of the men, including any supposed father, was involved.

Those were Grandma's words. Supposed father. When Needly had been about nine, she had considered those words. What, after all, Needly puzzled, did she know about Grandma? Only what Grandma had told her. Grandma's name had been Lillis; Lillis had birthed twin daughters, then four other children, then Trudis in this house. All but Trudis had been taken away while they were quite young.

Lillis had been told originally that they would all live well, elsewhere. Far elsewhere. Lillis had been told the several fathers of those children had been selected for Lillis by
­people from elsewhere:
selected because children from those couplings would be born with certain attributes that fit long-­planned purposes of
those ­people.
Lillis was told
those
­people
did not and never had lived in or near Tuckwhip, but
those ­people
had made sure each time that the right man would visit Lillis in her house and stay with her for long enough, however long that needed to be.
Those ­people
were not, Lillis reasoned, the same as those who lived in the House of the Oracles
. Both,
she assumed, might have contributed to her life and future, but the two groups were quite separate, though they
might
be aware of one another. She thought. Perhaps.

Whenever she told Needly things she thought Needly might at some time need to know, Grandma was careful to identify guesses and possibilities as just that. She never said definitely that she knew who was responsible for what. Needly, in fact, made no more sense of it than Grandma had.

More pertinently, she knew Grandma had purposefully learned herb lore and midwifery and healing because these would be useful skills in places like Hench Valley. Needly also realized that whoever had made the plans, whoever had sponsored the roll of the genetic dice, that individual had come up good for the three sons and three daughters who had departed as children.

“But they didn't stay with you, Grandma!” Needly had cried. “It makes me unhappy! I want someone to explain things. I really do!”

The woman had given her a long, measuring look, put the kettle on, made a pot of tea, and placed two cups on the table. She couldn't explain. She could tell the child only what she herself had wondered over.

“Needly, one of the men who lived in our family house for a time told me our world is very sick. He said lots of ­people know this, though there are even more ­people who deny it. I'm told that several groups of thoughtful ­people have looked into the future—­using every tool they had, thinking machines, gatherings of the wise, reading of history—­trying to come up with a way of straightening things out. They all agreed, finally, that mankind simply has not evolved far enough from the ape. Mankind still has parts of his brain that are
monkey-­brain
. It isn't their fault, they don't choose to think like monkeys, it's the only way they can think. They need immediate gratification. They aren't able to look ahead, to consider the consequences of their own actions. It's like an inherited disease—­no, more a condition.
Monkey-­brain
condition.”

She saw puzzlement in the child's face. “We don't have monkeys in this part of the world, Needly, but I've told you about them. Let's pretend, like we did when you were little. Let's pretend you're a monkey. Let's say you and your monkey husband somehow get blown by a storm onto a little island where there's nothing to eat except delicious fruit from one tree that bears fruit all the year around. Even the seeds of the fruit are delicious. Are you going to eat the fruit?”

Needly nodded. “ 'F I was hungry, I would. We all would.”

“Yes. A monkey wouldn't look at the fact there's just that one tree. A monkey wouldn't think, ‘Hey, wait, maybe we'd better plant some of these seeds.' A monkey would just eat the fruit as it gets ripe, year-around: him and his mate and their child. They chew and swallow the seeds and shit on the ground around the tree. And the next year there'd be another child. And the year after that another child. The children would mate and have other children. And the family would get bigger and bigger. And the fruit wouldn't quite fill them up, so they'd fight over it and some of them might be killed or hurt. And eventually there's so much poop around the tree that it burns the roots and the tree dies. That was the only tree, so the monkeys die as well. Monkeys don't know how to stop having babies. Monkeys don't know how to plant trees. Monkeys just know how to be monkeys: greedy, heedless monkeys. They have
monkey-­brain
.

“Humans evolved from creatures very much like monkeys, and they brag about their children. Even here, notice? Look out there at that Pa, strutting on the road, pointing out this little one, that little one, ‘That one's mine,' ‘Those two're mine,' ‘All these're mine!' The children are skinny little things that are always hungry; sometimes they have runny eyes and sores, but the men don't care. It isn't the
children
they're proud of. It's the
willy-­wagging
they're doing. Those men are
willy-­waggers
. ‘Oh, look how my willy waggles to make little ones, looky at me!' And when the tree dies, they'll starve to death on whatever island they're on. They have
monkey-­brain
.

­“People are still evolving, you know. At first there wasn't much difference between the smartest ones and the stupidest ones. But gradually, over the millennia, the difference between the most intelligent ones and the least intelligent ones has grown wider and wider. Why do you suppose?”

Needly's mouth puckered, and the skin between her eyes. “Because . . . because, Grandma, when smart women have a choice about it, they'd rather have smart men as fathers for their children, wouldn't they? It's kind of . . .”

“Selective. Right. Women would rather. Men . . . not so much. They're usually thinking about breasts more than they are of brains. But, very gradually, over the centuries, the distance between the smartest and the dumbest has grown. It's not a huge difference, but it's a critical difference. It means some ­people have developed a part of their brain that others haven't. They aren't the majority, mind you. The ­people with
monkey-­brain
are in the majority . . .”

“Why? Why are they?”

“What did I tell you about monkeys? They don't know how to plant trees, and they don't know how to—­”

“Stop having babies.”

“Right. Not every one, or each one, but in the aggregate, they have more than can be provided for. More than our island planet Earth can provide for. But because there are always more
monkey-brains
than there are the other kind, no one could do anything about it. The ones with the
monkey-­brain
fished the seas empty. They polluted the oceans. They strutted their children. And whenever someone pointed out what they were doing, the ­people with
monkey
-­
brain
said, ‘There's plenty of empty space.' Or, ‘Science will think of some new kind of crop,' or ‘We'll farm the oceans.' Remember,
monkey-­brains
aren't very smart. They don't realize that all the empty space is ice or desert or rock. They don't realize that there'd be no water to irrigate that new crop because they'd already used up the millions of years' worth of deep water in the underground aquifers. They didn't see that they'd already polluted the oceans with filth, and chemicals and deadly nuclear trash.”

“Didn't anybody tell them?”

“Of course! But you can't tell a
monkey-­brain
willy-­wagger
anything. It'd be like a dog howling at the moon. The moon doesn't care. And the
monkey-­brain
willy-­waggers . . .
I need a shorter word for that!”

“ ‘Mobwow,' ” cried Needly. “Call them Mobwows, Grandma. It's
monkey-­brain
willy-­wagger
with an
oh-­oh
in the middle. It'll work for women, too.
Monkey-­brain
womb-­wallowers.”

Grandma started to harrumph, then laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes. “Well, If anyone tries to tell a . . . Mobwow anything, the Mobwow says, ‘Oh, that's a lie the
other side
puts out.' The
other side,
mind you, is anyone who disagrees with them, that includes anyone who says population should be limited, anyone who says anything except ‘Wag your willy and use this world up.'

“Do you know that some religions used to say
not
having too many children was a sin!
Willy-­wagging
without having babies was a sin. The myth instead of the reality. Oh, shame.”

“Weren't they scared of what was going to happen when they ran out of room and food and clean water . . . ?”

“No. They either didn't believe it or they figured it wasn't going to happen in their lifetime, so they didn't care. Finally, back before the Big Kill, when the earth was actually dying, some very intelligent beings got together to try and find a solution. And they found there were actually two distinguishable races of humans. Not different colors or different languages or anything like that, but two distinguishable types. One kind had evolved a brain part that the other kind of ­people did not have. If you're born with that part, you don't have
monkey-­brain
. My family calls it the ‘if-­then' part.

“Up until mankind, creatures didn't need an
if-­then
part. That's the part that says, ‘
If
we add one more human being to our tribe,
then
we'll have to find a new cave.' Or maybe, ‘
If
this grain is growing clear here where I spilled that little bit,
then
maybe if I put a lot more in the ground near the cave, it will grow there, too.' Animals didn't need the
if-­then
part because nature creates its own balance. IF there are too many rabbits, THEN the coyote population will increase to reduce the number of rabbits. Things will come into balance.

“But that doesn't work for the Mobwows. If there had been just the one race, the Mobwows, they'd have been wiped out, or at least there'd be many fewer of them. But nature was never allowed to balance
monkey-­brain
­people. The other race of ­people, the smarter ones, always found a way to survive, and the
monkey-­brain
­people always rode piggyback on top of the sensible ones. One can't tell them apart, just looking.”

“Couldn't anybody teach the
monkey-­brains
?”

“No, child. Whenever someone tried to teach them the ‘if-­then,' they smothered it with myths. One of their favorite myths was
‘This earth doesn't matter. We won't really die. We'll just leave this world and be taken away to another world in heaven where everything is perfect and we'll live there forever.' ”

Needly was thoughtful for a long moment. “I suppose if you believe that, you can be totally selfish, can't you. It wouldn't matter what you did to other ­people or your world. You could just go ahead and ruin your world.”

“You can ruin. You can kill. You can pollute. You chop your way through the world, taking, burning, and destroying, without feeling any responsibility at all. None for your descendants, none for the earth. You can father twenty children, and if they starve to death, don't worry, they'll all live forever somewhere else. There's always enough well-­to-­do ones whose children are healthy and well fed to hold up as golden examples of Mobwowism. And every single one of those stories that they tell was started by a
monkey-­brain
person who believed in
willy-­wagging
as a way of life
.
You see, some of those ­people have only men to teach their religion—­a religion is a collection of myths, different ones for different ­people. So if they have only men as religious teachers, they never get any other viewpoint at all.”