The Fifth Sacred Thing (54 page)

That’s an odd turn of phrase, Madrone thought, but she said simply, “I’m sorry.”

“I loved my sister, headstrong little idiot that she was. I’d like to save her child.”

“I could tell you what drugs to get, and how to administer them.”

“It’s too dangerous. Don’t you see—we can’t afford to call any attention
to her existence. What if my husband found out? Mary Ellen could go to the pens for having an illegitimate child. They don’t usually enforce it with the blacks, but if we rub their noses in it, trying to doctor her, they’d have to.”

“Your husband doesn’t know?”

“My husband is an odious man. I never tell him anything.” The words were spoken without emotion, but Madrone heard the whiplash of pain behind them. She didn’t know what to say.

“I suppose this all looks pretty good to you,” Sara said. “This house, the money, the water—”

“No, it doesn’t look good to me.” Madrone turned and faced her. The blue eyes were cold, but like something flash-frozen in the first cold of winter, something pleading, aching to melt. “To me it looks like a form of hell.”

Sara flashed her wry grin. “You know an alternative?”

“Yes,” Madrone said seriously. “As a matter of fact, I do.” The child moaned and opened her eyes. Madrone read pain in them, and Sara stooped and laid a hand on the girl’s forehead.

“Angela, this nice lady is here to help you. She knows a lot of special magic, but it only will work if you keep it a secret. Never, never tell anybody about her. Promise?”

The girl nodded. Her eyes were huge and round and dark, and suddenly Madrone couldn’t stand the look in them. She wasn’t ready to take on a healing of this magnitude; she needed food and rest. How long had it been since she’d slept? But she couldn’t ignore the child’s pain. Closing her own eyes and calling in her power, she soothed the inflammation and poured vitality through the girl’s bloodstream, released pressure on swollen joints, and rewove the patterns of her
ch’i
. Her own energy was running low and she still hadn’t tackled the cause of the disease, but she knew suddenly that she didn’t have the strength to go deeper. Reluctantly, she withdrew. The child would have a remission, at least, and maybe Madrone could come back later and finish, when she was fed and rested, if she ever again were fed and rested. She had been here too long already, and yet she didn’t see how she could leave unobserved before dark. Suddenly Madrone was so tired that all she could do was slump down against the wall and close her own eyes. Just for a moment.

She awoke to find Sara still standing above her, looking down, her face unreadable.

“The child looks better,” she said.

“She’s improved but not cured,” Madrone said. “I don’t know—I might be able to cure her, but I can’t do it today. I just don’t have the strength.”

“I can see that.” Sara smiled again, the urchin grin that cut through the polished surface. “You need more than ten minutes of sleep.”

“A lot more.”

“We don’t expect miracles from you.”

Why not? Madrone thought. Everybody else does. And I produce them just often enough to keep them hoping.

“I’m not talking about miracles,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m talking about just a little more juice than I’ve got today. Or a few lousy credits’ worth of drugs.” It was back, suddenly, her rage, burning away her tiredness, making her feel invincible. Maybe she should tackle the child again now—but she had learned to distrust this state, knowing how the energy could suddenly drain away, leaving her spent. And she still had miles of trail to cover tonight, and the security forces to dodge. And she desperately needed to eat some more. “I don’t know, maybe I can come back another time. Or maybe next time we raid a pharmacy I can bring you some pills for her.”

“It’s ironic,” Sara said. “My husband manages a drug company. They send truckloads out to the labor camps. If I could think of a plausible story—but no. It’s just too dangerous. Anyway, how can I thank you?”

“You already saved my life once today. If I could eat something and drink something, you’d save it again.”

“Would you care to join me and the other ladies for lunch? Perhaps you could talk to us about where you come from.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“No. You can trust us. These friends—they’re more than friends, really. We’re a group—well, you’ll see. The hillboys aren’t the only ones trying to make changes.”

“I’ve got to get out of here somehow,” Madrone said.

“Stay here until after dark. Then I’ll drive you somewhere if you want.”

Madrone feared that she was trusting Sara only because she was too tired to think for herself. But I
am
too tired to think for myself, she admitted, so why not go along with her? I could learn something.

“Okay,” she said. With a great effort, she pulled herself up and once more leaned down to touch the forehead of the sleeping child. “She should be all right for a while, now. Let her rest.”

Six women were grouped around a long table in the atrium, a glass-covered enclosure crowded with tropical plants. The air felt soft and moist. An artificial stream flowed over stones set into the back wall and splashed into a tiled pool where water lilies bloomed. Philodendrons twined along the rafters, and banks of orchids bloomed in the corners. Ferns hung over the table, and potted palms rose gracefully from wicker baskets. Madrone stood still for a moment, inhaling the scents of damp earth and dripping leaves. She had hungered so for the sound of running water. For a moment, she felt that she would give anything, betray anyone, to stay in that cool green room and never be thirsty again.

Mary Ellen had exchanged Madrone’s uniform for clothes she called more suitable. They seemed to Madrone to reflect somebody’s fantasy of a revolutionary, or perhaps more of a colonial explorer: designer jungle fatigues. The women at the table were slender and elegant in pale-colored dresses that set off the rose and lilac undertones of their light skin. It was strange to see so many very pale women all gathered together, like a bed artificially devoted to one variety of flower. Madrone felt like a sagebrush in a garden of lilies.

Gold-edged china and cut-glass crystal goblets were set at each place, and vases overflowed with scented flowers. And the food! Not acorn mush and honey but crisp salad and vegetables, chicken in delicate sauce, fresh-baked bread, and, for dessert, sweet little cakes with sugar icing. The smells alone nearly knocked Madrone over.

Throughout the meal, the other women chatted among themselves, occasionally stealing a curious glance at Madrone but not drawing her into the conversation. She was grateful to be left alone; it took all her concentration to eat slowly and remember her manners.

When the cakes were finished and the women sat sipping tea from rose-patterned cups, Sara motioned them to silence.

“We have a very special guest today, ladies,” she said. “As you may know, twenty years ago when the Stewards’ Party consolidated its power, isolated areas broke away. Our guest is from one of those areas, from the North. She is down here at great personal risk and sacrifice, and I have asked her to speak to us about the social conditions of her area.”

All eyes focused on Madrone. Slowly, she set down her teacup and looked around the room. When she focused on their faces, they became distinct individuals. Now she noticed differences of dress and age and expression.

“My name is Madrone,” she began. By habit, she was starting to sign her words as she spoke them, as she would in a Council meeting. But the ripple of discomfort that passed over the women’s faces reminded her that they were not accustomed to the signs, so she placed her hands in her lap. The women were nervous enough already, the scent of fear was an acrid tinge under the sweet smells of perfume and flowers and cake and tea. “I come from San Francisco, which we sometimes call
Hierba Buena
, or
Gum Sahn
, or simply the City. I work there as a healer—a doctor, you would say—and I’m down here to offer service to those who are opposing the rule of the Stewards.”

“They have women doctors in the North?” one woman exclaimed.

“In the North, a woman can do any kind of work she wants to do and is trained for.”

An excited buzz went around the room, which was ended by an older woman, whose gray cap of hair crowned a thin, pinched face.

“I was a doctor,” she said. “No, I
am
a doctor. The Stewards can take away a license, but they can’t remove my knowledge and skill. So don’t act like a woman doctor is a zebra, for Jesus’ sake. It’s not such an exotic thing to be.”

“Thank you, Beth,” Sara interrupted smoothly. “Madrone, please go on.”

“Where I come from, we believe there are Four Sacred Things,” Madrone began.

“Like the Four Purities of the Millennialists?” queried a small woman with delicate bones.

“What are they?” Madrone asked.

“Moral Purity, Family Purity, Racial Purity, and Spiritual Purity.”

“Not exactly,” Madrone said. “The Four Sacred Things are earth, air, fire, and water. Nobody can own them or profit from them, and it’s our responsibility to heal them and take care of them. That’s the basis of our politics and our economy.”

This sparked a new round of questions, and once again Madrone found herself telling what she had come to think of as her fairy tale.

“Everybody has enough food and water. Everybody has a place to live and care when they’re sick. It’s hard, sometimes, because we’ve had so many die from the epidemics. There’s still so much to heal, in the earth and the waters. But we share, and we have enough. Because everybody works, and works hard. No one is supported just for being …” She hesitated, aware she was about to say something that might offend these women, but Sara chimed in.

“Being ornamental?”

“Or of a certain race or class or parentage,” Madrone added.

“But how do you force people to work when they don’t want to?”

“We don’t. People want to work, just as naturally as a child wants to walk and talk. Everybody wants to make some contribution.”

“And if someone doesn’t?”

Madrone shrugged. “Someone who really didn’t want to work could survive on a basic stipend, but it wouldn’t allow for many luxuries. Sometimes people are sick and can’t work, or they have a
ch’i
deficiency and don’t have much energy. Then we try to heal them. Sometimes people don’t like a particular kind of work, but there’s always something else to be done. I can’t imagine healthy people not wanting to do anything. They’d be terribly bored, and isolated, and shamed. We’d probably send them to the mind healers.”

“That’s different,” said the woman next to Madrone. “Here we have to corral them into farm camps and bribe them with increased water rations to get them into the factories. And still most of them would rather beg than work.”

“Spare us your prejudices, Judith,” Beth said. “Don’t you know that for every open job there’s fifty who want one and can’t get one?”

“I know you like to believe that, but I’ve been advertising for a new gardener’s boy for the last month and only had one applicant, who couldn’t read and didn’t know shit from a shovel, if you’ll pardon my language.”

“I won’t,” Beth said. “Although it’s not your profanity I object to but the ignorance behind it. How can we expect the lower classes to learn to read when the schools we provide for the poor are nothing but Millennialist indoctrination camps? And what are you offering to pay your gardener? A pittance and a few swallows of water? Have you tried offering a living wage?”

“Please, ladies!” Sara said. “Our guest has limited time with us. We have the rest of our lives to argue with each other.”

“And that’s about the most we’re capable of doing,” Beth grumbled, but she sat quietly as a woman at the end of the table addressed Madrone.

“What about the dirty, nasty jobs? Who picks up the garbage?”

“Every household has its own compost. And collecting the papers and bottles and recyclable things—a lot of people think that’s a really fun job. You get to circulate around the neighborhood, catch up on all the gossip. But the unpopular and dangerous things, like toxic cleanups—first we put out on the computer nets that we need volunteers. If we don’t get them, we choose them by lottery, from those who owe gift work to the region. You see, we each are obligated for a certain number of hours of gift work each year. Mostly, you can choose what you want to do. Or if you have a very vital skill, like being a healer, you can do it in your own specialty. Personally, in good years, when there’s no epidemics, I like to do something different, for a change. Tree planting or fruit picking, something outdoors and physical.”

“So what you have,” Beth said, “is the perfect communist society. I thought those theories were discredited back in the nineties.”

“No, we don’t,” Madrone said. “For one thing, we could debate whether Marxist theory was discredited or simply its particular twentieth-century implementations; it’s a discussion some people like to go on about endlessly. Are you familiar with Moraga’s Theory of the Limitations of Complexity, for example?”

“No,” Beth admitted.