Woman on the Edge of Time

“I knew it was going to be like this!” Luciente shrugged, throwing up his hands. Tonight he was wearing a ring of blue stone he played with, turning it round and round as he spoke. “Actually … I’m not here.”

“You’re telling me?”

“We arein contact. You are not hallucinating. Whether anyone else can see me, I’m not sure. Frankly, this … contact is experimental. It’s even, grasp, potentially dangerous–to us, I mean. Please don’t get frightened again. You’re happier being sarcastic.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re from the future, and naturally you picked me to visit rather than the President of the United States because I’m such an important and wonderful person.”

“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!” Connie pointed at his hands. In her freshman year she had had a biology course.

“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,” Connie snapped.

“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.” Connie lit a cigarette.

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 fanning wildly. “We study with any person who can teach us. We start out learning in our own village, of course. But after naming, we go wherever we must to learn, although only up to the number a teacher can handle. I waited two years for Rose to take me. Where you go depends on what you want to study. For instance, if I were drawn to ocean farming I’d have gone to Gardiners Island or Woods Hole. Although I live near the sea, I’m a land‑plant person.” Luciente clapped his hands to his cheeks. “Blathering about myself! I distract. There must be someplace to begin, if I could blunder on it. Well, at least you’re no longer scared of me.”

“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 grinned sheepishly, touching her hand. “Besides, I confess I am afraid to eat here. It’s not true, is it, the horror stories in our histories? That your food was full of poisonous chemicals, nitrites, hormone residues, DDT, hydrocarbons, sodium benzoate–that you ate food saturated with preservatives?”

“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, Connie. I’m sure many of the tales we hear are gross exaggerations. Such as the idea that you–you plural–put your shit into the drinking water.”

“I never heard such nonsense!” Connie flounced up and turned on the faucet of the sink. “That’s drinking water.” Then she hauled him up by the arm and marched him into the hall. He hung back skittishly until she said, “There’s no one.” Then he scuttled behind her nervously as she opened the door and showed him the toilet. She wished it were cleaner. She felt a little embarrassed. The other people who used it never cleaned it, and she cursed as she cleaned for all of them once a week. She flushed the toilet, pulling the chain for demonstration. “See? It goes down and is flushed away.” Following him back to her apartment and routinely locking the door with the bolt, the Yale lock, the police lock with its metal rod that fit into the floor, she sucked her lip with satisfaction. For the first time she had scored a point. Then she realized her reaction made sense only if she was such a naпve idiot as to believe his fairy tale.

“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?”