This is the thirteennth installment of an exploration of
some of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of
narrative fiction. Our narrator finishes up his trip to a tier one county, and
starts to notice ways in which the Lakeland Republic has gone neither forwards
nor backwards, but off on an angle all its own...
***********
It must have been midnight, or close to it, when Pappas and
I got back to the New Shaker gathering. The shooting went on until four in the
afternoon; during a lull in the gunfire, a little after noon, we got into line
outside a big olive-green tent in the middle of things, filed in, and left with
glasses of beer and sausages and sauerkraut on big fresh-baked rolls. After the
last drone was blown out of the air, people milled around while the judges
conferred, and then it was time for trophies to be handed out—Maude Duesenberg,
who I’d seen shooting earlier, squeaked out another win by a couple of points
over a scruffy-looking kid from the mountain country off east. They shook
hands, and he grinned; you could tell he was already thinking about getting
ready for next year’s shoot.
From there it turned into a big party, with plenty of
food—somebody spent most of the day roasting a couple of pigs, just for
starters—and no shortage of alcohol, either. Pappas and I ended up sipping
moonshine around a fire with the guys from the 34th Infantry, who were already
talking about what kind of stunt they were going to pull the following year. The
‘shine was pure enough that I’m honestly surprised that the whole lot of us
weren’t lifted into the treetops by a sudden explosion, just from the vapors.
As it was, I was tipsier than I usually let myself get by the time Pappas and I
headed back to the jeep, and he was worse off than I was. Did you know a
wheelchair can stagger? Trust me, I’ve seen it.
The next morning came too early, announced by the same
overenthusiastic rooster as before. I got myself washed and dressed, and
stumbled downstairs, to find Pappas looking as though he’d slept the clock
around and was ready for anything. “I’m going to have to get the early train
back,” he told me, “but Melanie says you want to see first tier up close, so
she found someone to show you around Hicksville—a city councilwoman, I think.”
“If she can show me the nearest barber shop first,” I said,
“I’d be happy.”
Pappas pulled out a pocket watch, glanced at it. “There’s
one on Main Street,” he told me. “If we go now you’ll have time to take care of
that before she shows up.”
That sounded like a good idea to me, so we said our goodbyes
to the New Shakers and piled into the jeep for the ride back into town. This
time there weren’t more than three or four wagons on the road that had been so
crowded two days back; I gathered that most of the attendees were either
sleeping off the consequences of the previous night or enjoying a leisurely
morning. Fields and pastures eventually gave way to the outlying houses of the
town, and then to the main street, which was paved—I hadn’t expected that—and
lined on both sides with the sort of shops and city buildings you’d expected to
see in an Old West history vid.
“City Hall’s there,” Pappas said as the jeep pulled up in
front of the promised barber shop. He pointed to a three-story building of what
looked like local stone half a block up the street. “Right next to the library.
Ask for Ruth Mellencamp. All set? Hey, it was a pleasure.” We shook hands, I
hauled my suitcase out of the jeep, and away it went.
I shook my head and went into the barbershop, and found a
half dozen guys ahead of me in line. I’d expected that; what I didn’t expect is
that four of them were singing. They had books open in their laps—copies of the
same songbook, I gathered after a fast glance—and were belting out some song I
didn’t know, and doing it in pretty fair harmony. I sat down in the nearest
available chair, tucked my suitcase back under the seat, and all of a sudden
had to fight down an impulse to laugh. You can run into a phrase hundreds of
times and never think about what it actually means; I must have read at least
that many references to “barbershop quartets” without realizing that that’s
what guys did in barbershops while waiting for a shave, back in the days when
there weren’t loudspeakers in the ceiling blaring pop music everywhere and
veepads sitting in everyone’s lap to make up for any lack of distraction. In
the Lakeland Republic, obviously, those days were back.
I’m pretty sure that if I’d picked up a copy of the songbook
from the table in front and joined in, nobody would have blinked, and in fact
that’s what happened with two of the next three guys to come into the barber
shop. The odd thing was that the songs weren’t the sort of thing I dimly
associated with barbershop quartets. I didn’t know most of them, but then I’ve
got pretty specific musical tastes—jazz on the one hand, and opera on the
other. Still, they were pretty good. One that stuck in my memory had a rock
beat, and something in the chorus about a star man waiting in the sky. I made a
note in my notebook to look it up once I got back home and could chase down the
lyrics on the metanet.
It was a half hour or so later when I left the barbershop,
feeling a lot less scruffy, and with another song’s chorus—“Turn and face the
strange ch-ch-changes”—ringing in my head. It wasn’t a bad bit of advice for
the day I was about to have, for that matter.
There were sidewalks, too, and I walked up the one that led
to City Hall, went in, and asked for Ruth Mellencamp. She turned out to be short,
plump, gray-haired, and businesslike, the kind of woman that looks like
somebody’s slightly batty granny until she starts talking and you realize
there’s a mind like a steel trap behind the cozy facade. “Pleased to meet you,”
she said, shaking my hand. “Yes, Ms. Berger called down from Toledo two days
ago. It’s not often we get visitors from outside here in Hicksville, and I
admit I’m curious to see what you’ll think of our little town.”
“So far,” I said, “I know that it has decent train service
and you can get an excellent shave here.”
She chuckled. “Well, that’s certainly a good start! Why
don’t you stash your suitcase here and we can have a look at the town.”
“I was a little surprised to see paved streets and sidewalks
here,” I said as we left the building. “I thought you didn’t have those in a
first tier county.”
“They weren’t paid for with tax money,” she said. “About ten
years ago, some of the business people in town got together, organized a
corporation, got a charter from the legislature for it, and used that to raise
money to pave six streets downtown. A lot of people contributed, and not just
people who live in town. So the streets got built, a fund was set aside to
repair them, and the corporation wound up its affairs and closed down.”
“I imagine you know,” I said, “just how odd that sounds to
someone from outside.”
“Of course.” She gestured down the street, and we turned.
“The thing is, that’s what corporations were originally: schemes for public betterment that were
chartered by one of the old state governments for a fixed term, and allowed to
raise money by stock sales for that reason alone. It wasn’t until clever
lawyers twisted the laws out of shape that corporations got turned into
imaginary persons with more rights and fewer responsibilities than the rest of
us.”
I remembered what Vinny Patzek told me about corporations at
the Toledo stock market. “So you went back to the older way of doing things.”
“Exactly. We do that a lot here.”
“I’ve gotten that impression,” I said dryly, and she
chuckled again.
Hicksville was a farm town’s farm town, and you could tell.
The biggest store in town was a feed-and-seed with big silos out back, next to
a rail siding where freight cars could pull up to take on loads of grain, and
the next biggest business was a whiskey distillery—“you won’t find a better
bourbon in the Republic,” Mellencamp told me—which also had its own rail
siding, and a loading dock stacked with cases of bottles ready to ship.
Thinking about the tier system when I was in Toledo, I’d conjured up a picture
of log cabins, dirt roads, and the kind of squalor you get in the poorer rural
districts of the Atlantic Republic these days, but that’s not what I saw all
around me in Hicksville. What I saw instead was a bustling, tolerably prosperous
community that somehow got by without the technologies everyone outside took
for granted.
We stopped in front of another big building of local stone,
with HICKSVILLE SCHOOL carved over the door. “I don’t know whether you’re
interested at all in our education system,” Mellencamp said.
“Actually, I am,” I told her. “Ours has problems; maybe I
can pick up some useful ideas.” It was half a joke and half the understatement
of the year—the public schools all over the Atlantic Republic are a disaster
area, and the private schools charge more and more each year for an education
that isn’t all that much better.
She beamed. “Maybe you can. We’re very proud of our school
here.”
We went inside. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised
that there were no armed guards in flak jackets standing in the halls—I’d seen
none of those elsewhere in the Republic—but it still rattled me. The place was
clean and pleasant, without the prison look schools have back home. We went to
the office, a little cubbyhole in front with a desk for the secretary and a
bunch of filing cabinets, and Ellencamp introduced me; the secretary had me
sign in, said something pleasant, and away we went.
“People come here all the time,” Mellencamp explained.
“People moving to the area who want to check out our schools, parents and
grandparents who have free time and want to volunteer, that sort of thing. It’s
very much part of the community.”
There were eight classrooms, one for each of the eight
grades taught there. We slipped into the back of the second grade classroom,
nodded a greeting to the teacher, and sat in wooden chairs up against the back
wall. The room was about as plain as could be, a simple square space with a
blackboard and a teacher’s chair and desk up in front, a round clock over the
door, four big windows letting in light on the left, a teacher’s desk and chair
up front, and rows of seats for the students, each with its little half-desk
curving forward from one arm. The teacher was maybe thirty, brown-skinned, with
her hair in a flurry of braids tied back loosely behind her neck. A blonde girl
of sixteen or so was standing next to the desk, reading a simple story aloud,
and the students were following along in their textbooks.
I leaned over to Mellencamp. “Who’s she?” I whispered,
meaning the girl who was reading.
“An apprentice,” she whispered back, and motioned to a boy
around the same age, brown-haired and red-cheeked, who was going from student
to student, and now and then squatting down and murmuring something or pointing
to some bit in the book. “So’s that one.”
I gave her a startled look, but decided not to risk
interrupting.
The story wound to an end, and then the teacher started
asking questions about it to one student after another—not the kind of simple
you’d expect to see in a test back home, either. It sank in after a moment that
she was actually asking the kids for their thoughts about this or that part of
the story. I put my hand on my chin. It struck me as a very odd way to run a
lesson—wasn’t the point of schooling to make sure that everyone in the class
came up with the right answer when it was called for? Not in the Lakeland
Republic, I gathered.
The reading lesson ended at ten-thirty sharp—it took me a
while to remember how to read a clock with hands, but I managed it—and once it
was over, the students and both apprentices got up and trooped out the door in
a ragged but tolerably well behaved line. Ruth Mellencamp got to her feet once
the last of them were gone, gestured for me to follow, and went to the front of
the room. “Angie,” she said, “this is Peter Carr, who’s visiting from outside.
Mr. Carr, Angela McClintock.”
We shook hands, said the usual polite things. “How long do
you have before the next class?” I asked.
The teacher gave me a blank look, then smiled the
you-don’t-get-it smile I’d seen too often for my liking already. “They’ll be
back in fifteen minutes, after morning recess.” It was my turn to wear a blank
look, and her eyebrows went up. “Good heavens, you can’t expect second graders
to sit still for an entire school day. Don’t the early grades have recesses
where you’re from?”
“We probably should,” I allowed.
“You certainly should. If I kept them in much longer they’d
be so restless wouldn’t absorb a thing I taught them. This way, fifteen minutes
from now they’ll be ready to sit back down and pay attention to the next set of
lessons.”
I nodded. “I was curious about the two young people who were
helping you—apprentices?.” She nodded, beaming, and I went on: “They look a
little young to have gotten a teaching degree already—will they go to college
and get that after their apprenticeship?”
That got me the blank look again, and this time it wasn’t
followed by the too-familiar smile. Ruth Mellencamp came to the rescue. “They
used to send teachers to college before the war,” she said. “I gather they
still do that outside.”
“And I gather you don’t do that here,” I said.
“Good heavens, no,” said the teacher. “Why would we? You
don’t need a college degree to teach second graders how to read—just patience
and a little bit of practice.”
“But I’m sure you teach them more than reading,” I objected.
“Yes, but the same thing’s true of all the three C’s,” she
said.
“That’s what we call the curriculum,” Mellencamp added,
seeing the blank look start to appear on my face. “Literacy, numeracy,
naturacy—we call those the three C’s.”
I took that in. “So you teach them to read, and
then—mathematics?”
“Literacy’s more than just reading,” McClintock said. “It’s
the whole set of language skills—reading, grammar, spelling, logical reasoning,
composition and speaking, so they can learn whatever interests them, think
intelligently about it, and share what they find with other people. Numeracy’s
the whole set of number skills—mathematics, sure, but also the trick of putting
things in numerical terms and using math in the real world, so probability,
statistics, everything you need to keep from being fooled or flummoxed by
numbers.”
“Okay,” I said. “And—naturacy? I don’t even know the word.”
“The same principle,” said the teacher. “The whole set of
natural science skills: learning how to observe, how to compare your
observations to what’s already known or thought to be known, how to come up
with hypotheses and figure out ways to test them—and also natural history, what
living things you found here, how they interact with us, with their habitats,
with other living things.”
“I suppose you don’t teach that in the schools back home,”
said Mellencamp.
“There are college classes,” I said.
“Most of these kids will grow up to be farmers,” McClintock
told me. “Most of those that don’t will be dealing with farmers and the farm
economy here every day of their lives. How on Earth will they know how to do
that if they don’t understand soil and weather and how plants grow?”
“Back before the war,” Mellencamp reminded her, “corporate
farmers tried to do without that .”
“Yes, and look what happened.” She shook her head. “I’m not
sure we’ve learned everything we should have from the mistakes that were made
back then, but that’s one I think we got.”
I thought about that on the train that afternoon all the way
back to Toledo.
**************
In other fiction-related news, I’m delighted to announce that the first volume of my Lovecraftian epic fantasy The Weird of Hali is now available for preorder. The publisher, Miskatonic Books, is sensibly enough releasing the high-end hardback editions first. Those of my readers who are interested in a signed limited edition hardback of The Weird of Hali: Innsmouth can preorder it here; those who want to go way over the top and order one of 26 copies of the fine edition, handsewn, traycased, and bound in the skins of beasts better left unnamed, can order it here. Beyond the wholesome attractions of writhing tentacles and eldritch horrors from three weeks before the dawn of time, this novel and its sequels deal with a good many of the core themes of The Archdruid Report, and should be of interest to many readers of this blog.
