The Fifth Sacred Thing (55 page)

“She’s an economist who’s also well versed in the principles of chaos theory. To put it simply, she says the old giant state socialist countries like the Soviet Union failed because they attempted too much control over too much complexity. She makes the same criticism of much twentieth-century technology. And she traces it back to the mechanistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, which saw nature as a great machine, something we could ultimately know and completely control.” You’re laying it on a bit thick, Madrone told herself, but she was enjoying herself, watching the expressions change from a slight air of condescension to outright astonishment. More than that, she thought, as she caught a spark in the eyes of Beth and one or two others, I’ve
been as hungry for this as for vegetables: talk, discussion, something to stretch the mind more than the question of which ridge to cross next.

“I would love to talk with you more about that,” Beth said, “but I suspect what these ladies most want to know is how your system functions.”

“We don’t have centralized control of the economy, although we do have as much coordination as possible. We don’t have production quotas, for example. Work groups set their own goals and run their own affairs and barter in the markets for credits. But we’ve come to understand wealth and account for it in different ways. Marx said that wealth came from labor, but we say there are three different sources, and labor is only one, the most variable. There is also the stored labor of the past: for example, a house that was built a generation ago, or my grandmother’s English bone china. That sort of wealth should also be shared fairly, not hoarded up in a few families. And finally there’s wealth that is based on the resources of the earth, on the Four Sacred Things, and that wealth no one can profit from individually.”

“Do you use money?” the woman next to her asked.

“Our credits function like money, but they’re not backed by gold or silver. They’re backed by energy, human and other sorts, and our basic unit of value is the calorie. So a product is valued by how much energy goes into its production, in terms of labor and fuel and materials that themselves require energy to produce. And part of that accounting is how much energy it takes to replace a resource that is used. Something that works with solar or wind power becomes very cheap. Anything requiring irreplaceable fossil fuels is generally too expensive to think about.”

“But do you have rich and poor?” the same woman asked.

“We’re each guaranteed a share of the wealth of the past and of the resources, which translates into a basic stipend of credits. As I said before, you could live on that, frugally, if you really didn’t want to work. But if you do work, you earn work credits, and the more you work the more you earn, so there’s incentive for those who want personal advancement. And if you do something really spectacular, achieve something fabulous, people bring you gifts.”

“Don’t people cheat?” asked a woman at the end of the table.

“All the accounts are public. Your whole work group sees the bill you put in each week, and believe me, they know if it’s accurate. If not, you’ll hear about it, and if necessary they’ll bring it up before your Guild or Council. Of course, some jobs don’t lend themselves to counting hours, like mine, or like being an artist or a musician. We get a fixed stipend.”

“But how do you keep track of these credits? Do you have a computer system?” Beth asked.

“A very sophisticated one,” Madrone said. “It’s based on silicon crystals
we grow from sea water. The tecchies direct their formation by visualization. It’s a very specialized skill, and not everyone can learn to do it.”

“So you have an advanced technology. You’re not a primitive Utopia,” Sara said.

“We’re not a Utopia at all, and our technology is as advanced as it can be, given our limitations and the general depletion of resources. But we’ve had to make some hard choices. After the Uprising, every tool and device and process was reevaluated according to the Five Criteria of True Wealth that Latasha Burton developed.”

“Which are?” Beth asked.

“Usefulness. Sustainability—meaning that it must generate or save as much energy as it consumes and doesn’t depend on nonrenewable resources. Beauty. Healing for the earth, or at least not being destructive. Nurturing for the spirit. Private automobiles failed, for example. They’re certainly useful and many people maintained that they can be beautiful, but they weren’t sustainable. Computers based on our new crystals passed, and the Net we created also provides communication, news, accounting, lots of things. We’ve also made advances in solar and wind power and small-scale agriculture. Some industries disappeared—there are no vidsets or widescreens because we couldn’t support the infrastructure they needed. Others had to change. We print a lot of books, but we make paper from hemp, not from trees.”

“What about women’s work? Do you have servants who clean your houses and mind the children?” Judith asked.

“We all do that sort of work, not just women but men too. And it’s all paid for. Every household gets credits for a certain number of working hours per person, for home maintenance and for child care, or care of anyone who might need it. You can trade those credits around any way you like—keep them if you do your own work or assign them to somebody else if you’d rather get someone else to do it for you. And there are usually some people around, like students, who want to pick up a few credits without having to commit to a work group.”

“And marriage?” Sara asked.

“That’s a personal arrangement between the people involved. Sometimes it’s based on their religion, if they belong to one that has rules about those things. But it’s no longer an economic arrangement. If a woman—or a man—wants to stay home and take care of the house and the kids, they’d collect all those work credits and they’d be valued just as much as for work done outside the home, because all work is valued the same.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean a healer’s work isn’t worth more per hour than a farmer’s or a teacher’s. Oh, we kick it around in Council all the time, there’re endless
debates about it, but it always comes down to the fact that our system cannot work if we start to say one person’s work or skill is worth more than somebody else’s. An economic system is like an organism, and to function all its parts are necessary.”

“So divorce is legal?” Sara asked.

“Isn’t it legal here?”

“It’s a sin,” Sara said, and Madrone thought her voice sounded somewhat wistful. “You lose your immortal soul. Unless you have money for an offering to secure a dispensation.”

“Which women never have on their own,” Beth said. “Only the men.”

“Some men,” Judith said. “Not most men. Even well-off men are rarely that rich.”

“It’s not legal or illegal back home,” Madrone said. “We don’t have a whole lot of laws about those things. It’s just up to the people involved. Unless there’s some sort of problem they can’t agree about—say, if they have kids and they can’t agree who will take them. Then they have to bring in a Mediator or take it to their Neighborhood Council.”

“So a man can just leave his wife for someone younger or better looking?”

“If that’s what he wants to do. Or she can leave him, for a better-looking man. Or woman. But she doesn’t depend on him for her living, so she’s never left without support.”

“The argument here,” another woman said, “is that the Moral Purity laws protect women. Without them, men would just run wild, raping women on the streets.”

“Whereas
with
the laws,” Beth said, “men have women in their own privately stocked reserves, one for the wife, one for the mistress, one for anything or anyone they care to order from the catalogs.”

“Don’t you have a lot of rape and perversion?” a woman asked, ignoring Beth’s comment.

“We don’t have any perversion.”

“Oh, come,” Beth said. “Every human society on the face of this earth has had homosexuality.”

Madrone laughed. “We have plenty of that. Is that what’s considered perversion?”

“Among other things. What about incest and child molesting?”

“We don’t have the kind of social isolation that breeds it. We have a lot of different kinds of families. Some of us grow up in big collectives, like I did. Some are in extended families, with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents; some in small nuclear families. But we make sure that no family is isolated. The Neighborhood Councils form support groups of people from different kinds of households and backgrounds—to give different perspectives. So every kid has half a dozen aunties and uncles from the time they’re
tiny. They’re encouraged to talk about things, to ask for help, to protect themselves. And we train all our children, early on, in self-defense, both girls and boys. Oh, I’ve read a lot about incest and child abuse, but we don’t have the climate of secrecy and shame that lets it go on for any length of time. I’m not saying it never happens, but nothing supports it. The same with rape. Our men aren’t raised to believe they have the right to rape. In fact, we consider it the most shameful, degraded thing a man could do.”

“What if it does happen?” the small woman asked.

“If it does? First, everybody in his family would talk to the person and tell him how shocked and horrible they feel. So would his
compas
, his friends and lovers, his Guild or Council, his Neighborhood Council, maybe the whole City Council. He wouldn’t be welcome in anybody’s house, or work group, or to eat with anybody. The mind healers might take him in if he wanted to get better—but it would take him years to regain people’s trust. Maybe he’d have to go off to the hills to live with the Wild Boar People, the ones who can’t fit into society.”

“And if he won’t go? How do you make him? Do you have police?”

“We find it’s better not to assign that role to any one group of people. For one thing, they generally aren’t around when you really need them, and for another, they tend to abuse their power. Instead, like I said, we’re all trained in self-defense, and as we get older we get more advanced Peacekeeper training—how to intervene in a heated conflict, how to restrain somebody. If there’s a fight, let’s say, which happens from time to time although it’s fairly rare, whoever happens to be around will take care of it. I did once see a man banished to go live with the Wild Boar People. He was yelling and fighting, but there were ten people around him and they got his arms into restraints. It was very upsetting to watch, although they didn’t hurt him. They put him on a fire truck, and I guess someone drove him up to the Sonoma Hills, where the Wild Boar People live by hunting feral pigs. Once you’re banished, your name and picture go out on the Net. Everybody knows who you are, and you can’t come back unless the City Council approves. For ten days in midwinter, though, we let some of the Wild Boar People come in to market to sell their pigs. But that’s all.”

“But if you’re unarmed, couldn’t one maniac with a laser rifle take over your whole city?” Judith said.

“No,” Madrone said. “Somebody would stop him. People would stop him together, even if some of them got killed doing it.”

“A few men, then,” Judith said. “An organized group with modern weaponry.”

“Well, I guess we’ll soon find out, won’t we?” Beth said. “If the rumors from the army prove true.”

“What rumors?” Madrone asked. “Have they attacked us?”

“Not yet,” Beth said. “But they seem to be gearing up for it.”

Oh, Goddess, no, Madrone thought. I want to go home. I don’t want to be here with these strange women asking me endless questions. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling them any of this. How do I know they aren’t spies? Didn’t Bird suffer and nearly die to avoid revealing what I’ve just blurted out over lunch—that we have no real defenses?

“That takes care of Moral Purity and Family Purity,” the small woman went on. “Do you have laws about Racial Purity?”

Maybe I should just shut up. But Hijohn told me to talk to people. Of course, he wasn’t thinking of these women, but how are they supposed to have any hope of change down here if they don’t know what is possible?

“Don’t you want to answer?” the woman asked.

“She’s tired,” Sara said.

“No, I’m okay,” Madrone said. I’ve told them enough already, there’s no point in stopping now. She smiled. “Racial Purity would be hard to enforce, when we’re such a bunch of mongrels.”

“That didn’t stop them here,” Beth said. “They just classified people one race or the other, sometimes rather arbitrarily. I’ve seen some blacks as light as me, and a few whites darker than you who knew the right officials to bribe when the classifications were made.”

“Actually, we honor our ancestors, but we don’t think a lot about race, exactly,” Madrone said. “We consider it a concept designed to separate people. We try to honor all our different heritages and histories. Diversity is part of our strength. It enriches us.”

“So is it unusual for people of—uh, your race to be doctors?” asked a woman who wore her dark hair in a towering construction piled precariously on her head. “Did you go to the university?”

“Anyone who wants to can go to the university, if there’s something you want to study. It has nothing to do with what color you are or what genitals you’re born with.”

“In theory that’s true here,” Beth said. The women looked at her, amazed. “I’m serious. There’s no law on the books preventing women from studying to be doctors or engineers or heads of corporations. Blacks or Latins, either. They just rig the admissions tests so the wrong ones don’t get in.”

“We don’t have admissions tests to the university,” Madrone said. “If you aren’t prepared for the work, you find out pretty quickly and get help, or go do something else.”

“But not everyone is intelligent enough for academic work,” Beth said. “Surely you aren’t trying to tell us that.”

“Not everyone is, or is interested,” Madrone admitted. “But if you’re not good at intellectual work, if it’s frustrating, why would you stay there when you can go find some work to do where you
can
make your contribution?”

They talked on, asking Madrone about the Uprising, about the Councils and the work groups and the history of the last twenty years, until Madrone’s head began to ache.