The First Love Of Alipang Havens

Terrance, Ransom and Wilson stayed up that night far longer than anyone else, wishfully and wistfully talking about careers they might like to have as adults. Reality offered all of them farming and mining as the most likely options.

Wednesday morning, half an hour after Terrance had saddled up and said his goodbyes--including to Jillian, albeit not as romantically as she had hoped--a copy of the latest Wyoming Observer found its way to Alipang's office much sooner than Terrance or Alipang had expected. It was brought over by a man who came for that express purpose. Raoul Rochefort, a tall and sturdy man of Haitian ancestry--but not a voodoo practicioner, or he would have been popular with high society on the outside rather than exiled to the inside--showed the paper to Alipang and Kim as soon as they had a break between patients.

"See, here she is;" and Raoul pointed to the black-and-white reproduced photograph of Overseer Third Class Dana Pickering which accompanied her biography and interview. "Looks as if she's trying to be attractive, yet to give the impression that she isn't trying TOO hard."

Kim leaned closely over the page with the picture. "She has taste, anyway, when she isn't wearing one of those mirror suits. Or whoever dressed her for this picture has taste. She's stylish but not garish, sexy without overdoing it."

"I wonder what she's up to, or what THEY are up to?" mused the Haitian. "She seems to want attention, and seems to want to be accepted as a normal person; yet in her patrols through town so far, she never talks to very many people. On the other hand, when she does talk to anyone, it's in a friendlier way than Rasulala did. Al, has she done a lock check on your house yet?"

"No. The time she came in as a patient still is the only time I've ever spoken with her." Alipang was preoccupied with actually reading the article. "This is interesting. Her biography says that she has parents who are still married to this day."

"Since when does the Campaign Against Hate make it a positive point for its enforcers to come from normal, intact families?" asked Kim, rhetorically.

"Maybe since they're trying to slip sheepskin over their wolf's fur," said Alipang. "Kim, you remember what Dad told us about that sermon of Pastor Zondei's." Kim nodded understandingly, so Alipang faced Raoul and explained. "Pastor Zondei in Casper said in a recent sermon that he would be MORE worried if the Overseers began acting friendly, because then the more naive Christians might be conned into believing that the regime's fundamental hostility toward us had changed just like that."

"Well, if that's their game, I won't be fooled," Raoul declared. "Though if I weren't a married man, AND if I didn't know this Pickering woman to be the same kind of snake as all Overseers, I could imagine being interested. But no, a pretty snake still is a snake. You can keep the paper for your waiting room; I have to move along to a repair job." Raoul was a talented handyman: a valuable profession indeed, in a territory which had far to go in bringing its infrastructure to stability. He had the good fortune to have a cousin who was a foreman at a uranium mine; this man, having a better income than most exiles, had bought a good array of tools over in Rapid City, and presented them to Raoul as a gift last Christmas. (Inside the Enclave, they were allowed to call it Christmas.)

"Thanks, Raoul, see you later;" and Alipang turned back to reading the remainder of the article about Miss Pickering. He could feel Kim's eyes on him as he did so; but since he felt no improper interest in the female Overseer, and since Kim was not one to make up grievances without cause, he had no fear of her imagining wrong thoughts on his part.

Kim, however, could be worried about Overseer Pickering even while trusting her husband. For as great as Alipang's integrity was, the Overseers were not above pulling a Potiphar's-wife routine: making it APPEAR as if Alipang had done some wrong when he hadn't. If they wanted to degrade Alipang's moral authority in this town, that might be the way to do it.

Kim was going to have to talk with her husband about this--but not until after he had finished with all his patients for the day. When they did have their talk, one thing she would say would be to urge Alipang to try to avoid encountering that woman while away on his next Grange duty tour.
 
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Reporting in at the base on Wednesday evening, Dana requested not to have to bother with territory south of Sussex tomorrow; she wanted to spend more time IN Sussex. Captain Butello had already given more leeway by approving Dana's idea of getting herself interviewed by the newspaper, so it was no big deal to approve this request. It wasn't as if ANY of the exiles were genuine terrorists or gangsters, so the farmland between Sussex and Casper could be left in peace for a day.

When Dana woke up on Thursday morning, it was with a short-lived notion that all the exiles would be in church today. Then she remembered that Sunday remained the predominant day for worship in the Enclave; it was outside, in the mainstream of the Diversity States, that Christians were told they could only have group worship on Thursday evenings, in order that Sundays could be reserved for important things like Equalityball games.

She did not take long to eat breakfast, make sure her electric motorcycle was fully charged, and set out on patrol. No helicopter for her this time, because this time she was not commencing her rounds on the side of Sussex opposite to the base. She headed south over the unkept roads--and she herself swerved to avoid collisions when horses and horse-drawn vehicles came in view. She knew that most Overseers would make the exiles and their horses get out of the way, but she didn't feel right about doing that. All the same, she made good time; the morning was far from ended when she pulled into the town which was of real interest to her.

Now, the question is, have I been patient enough? Have I avoided Dr. Havens long enough, so that he won't think I'm being overeager about seeing him again? But why should he even suspect that I would feel--a human attraction toward him? He despises all of us, and would be repulsed, even disgusted, if he DID suspect how I feel about him. So why am I bothering with trying to further the acquaintance? That's a good question; what could possibly come of it, even if he were unattached? Am I trying to prove that women can make their own conquests? What am I trying to prove? What do I really want from Alipang Havens, and what makes me think he won't prefer death to anything I could offer him? Maybe I should forget the whole crazy notion. But can I forget all those dreams?

Dana was nearing the one maintained public park in Sussex. By the permission of the Overseers, because the town contributed volunteers for the Grange Association, this park had an archery range. Four men were practicing on it right now....and ONE of them....

If Dana had believed in the existence of a Supreme Being, she would have now felt an impulse to thank Him, Her or It. There stood the dentist of Sussex, Wyoming, looking not at all dentist-like as he bent his compound bow and added one more arrow to the cluster of arrows in the center of his target, over a distance of a hundred meters.

She felt a strangely delicious shiver of--almost fear--when she realized that Alipang's arrows were flying at such a velocity that they might penetrate Overseer body armor. There was no evidence that this Christian dentist had any wish to slay Overseers; besides, he would have to know that he could never avoid being identified as the slayer if he did slay one. Still, with bow and arrows in his grasp, Alipang Havens assumed an aura of danger, which somehow complemented, not contradicted, the aura of benevolent professionalism he possessed with dental instruments in his grasp.

Dana Pickering parked her noiseless motorcycle at the edge of the park, and quietly walked closer to the archers at practice. None of the men had looked in her direction up to now; yet somehow it didn't surprise her when Alipang Havens did swing around to look at her, as if he had been expecting her. No arrow was nocked on his bowstring as he turned; but of course, he would be careful with safety for ANY bystander.

There was a whistle hanging from Alipang's sturdy neck. He now lifted it to his lips and blew four blasts: the traditional archery-range signal meaning "Everybody stop everything."
 
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Alipang laid his bow on the nearest bench, then stood facing the mirror-suited figure with his arms folded across his chest: a posture which was not belligerent, but not servile either. "Overseer Pickering, isn't it?"

The tall woman -- twelve centimeters taller than Alipang, though nowhere near being as hard-muscled as he -- raised her helmet visor. She was smiling. "Yes, Dr. Havens, I'm Dana Pickering. Do you want to see my teeth to make sure it's me?" Alipang picked up several hints from the woman's voice, expression and physical actions. Her smile seemed forced, but not forced in a way that hid hostility; rather, forced in a way that hid nervousness. Her voice held a note of embarrassment, or uncertainty, even shyness, worlds removed from the abrasive swaggering of Kasim Rasulala. Her calling him "Doctor" was more courteous than the generic "Citizen" which was as friendly as most Overseers ever got with exiles. And it was significant that she was standing directly between her motorcycle and the man she was addressing.

Every Overseer motorcycle mounted a specimen of some of the highest technology that could be encountered inside the Enclave: a compact particle-beam weapon, which only an Overseer could activate. Alipang and others like him knew about the existence of these weapons because, very early in the Enclave's brief history, several dissenters foolishly trying to escape from this reservation had been murdered by the particle beams. Given its necessary smallness, each weapon was good for only three shots before needing to be recharged at an Overseer base; thus, they were not so formidable as to violate the Hemispheric Union's restrictions on armaments in the Diversity States. But against a disarmed population, they were a potent card for the Overseers to play. Safety from their own particle beams was the reason why the Overseers wore their reflective suits, though the weapons were theoretically programmed never to shoot if an Overseer was in their line of fire.

So there was a meaning in Dana Pickering's positioning of herself which could not be accidental. She was purposely shielding Alipang from her beam weapon -- which could be remotely triggered -- as a gesture of benign intentions.

Alipang did not return her smile; he would not have smiled at _anyone_ who he was sure was smiling at him falsely, and still less would he smile at an attractive woman who might possibly have dishonorable wishes toward him. But neither did he scowl; and he did find something relatively friendly to say to this woman. "I've seen the newspaper with your interview. Your volunteering information about yourself did a lot to make that edition more substantial, and probably to set the newer exiles more at ease."

"Then it succeeded at what I hoped it would accomplish." The Overseer's gaze now took in Alipang's companions. "I should say, what WE hoped it would accomplish; of course, my superiors wouldn't have let me offer the interview if they hadn't approved of my suggestion. We want to show that your new journalistic operation can be allowed to work _without_ being controlled by us, yet can serve to improve relations between us and the community at large."

A middle-aged Hispanic man named Sumerico Bivar, the eldest of the archers who had been practicing, accepted the implied invitation to comment. "Will relations improve enough that we can have some kind of elected local government?" As things currently stood in the Western Enclave, the Grange Association, the churches, and the two regional corporations providing services to the energy industry, were the only entities in which any exiles could ever vote about anything, and they didn't count as any kind of government. Occasional town meetings were permitted in the cities, but all they could decide on was the formulating of requests, which the federal authorities could choose to ignore.

Whatever wasn't supervised from the top down by the Campaign Against Hate in the persons of Overseers, was supervised from the top down by bureaucrats from the Department of Sustainable Energy (the same department which had sent Bill Shao and his companions to Casper), or from the Department of Eco-Sensitive Agriculture (which had become a force to be reckoned with by absorbing the old United States Department of the Interior, with the Forestry Service).

Dana Pickering answered the older man: "That is a policy matter, far above my level. If what you want never happens, it won't mean that you are being specially deprived; you know that popular elections have been eliminated _outside_ the Enclave as well."

Alipang nodded reflexively. There, at least, the policewoman had said something more or less truthful.
 
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Almost all the civilians in or near the park had subtly drifted away by now; as a matter of principle and precaution, they didn't want to attract unnecessary attention from any Overseer, even one who was trying to be friendly. Besides the Grange archers, there only remained an Amish family which had come to town on some business or other. While Alipang and his friends were finding this or that innocent subject to speak about with Dana Pickering (since she clearly wanted them to speak with her), the youngest member of the Amish family, a six-year-old girl, suddenly broke away from her mother and trotted fearlessly up to the Overseer.

"Are you a machine?" the little girl asked, looking up into Dana's face.

Dana's smile seemed at one time to grow both more sincere, and more nervous. "No, young one, I'm a person."

The child stared more closely. "You don't look like a purse, you look like a woman." Gender neutrality had never caught on with the Amish. "I guess you're not a machine; Papa says machines have no souls, but I think you have a soul." Then, before Dana could find any reply to this, the little girl obeyed her mother's insistent command to come back.

Alipang sensed that the Overseer wanted to say more to the child, but didn't want to alarm the parents. When she visibly gave up on the idea, Alipang had a sudden inspiration. "Overseer Pickering, if the Campaign Against Hate will authorize you to have a soul, you might find that you CAN relate better to us exiles. Of course, that would raise the question of whether you are allowed even a little bit of nonconformity."

The elder archer said something non sequitir before Dana could react to Alipang's words: "Officer, these are excellent bows you allow us to use; but I always worry that a pulley could get broken. Is there any reason why we couldn't be allowed to make plain wooden bows, as a sort of low-tech backup?"

"I, um, I'll bring it up to my superiors. Please continue your target practice; I'm going to continue my patrol now." She turned away from the middle-aged man, and gazed into Alipang's eyes for three seconds before closing her visor and returning to her motorcycle.

Alipang was left with plenty to think about.

So was Dana.
 
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Chapter Ten: The Outside Remnant

On the first Thursday evening in June, a week after Dana Pickering's visit to the archery range in Sussex, Daniel and Chilena Salisbury brought their children to the Oneness Temple near their home in Georgetown, in what had been the state of Delaware. Thursday evenings were when the Campaign Against Hate allowed the most leeway to Christians: they could actually mention Jesus Christ, _without_ having to give mathematically equal praise to Zeus, Odin, Ishtar, Lao-Tse, Krishna, Zoroaster, Buddha, Hillel, Muhammad, Quetzalcoatl, Baha'ullah, Mary Baker Eddy, Wovoka, Gandhi, and John Lennon. (Followers of any of those others, naturally, were never at any time required to give any recognition to Jesus.)

"Stay close," Chilena told her children, as they walked from the train platform to the temple; "here come some autograph hunters." Dan and Chilena had three children as did Alipang and Kim, but girl-boy-girl instead of boy-girl-boy, and averaging a year younger than Alipang and Kim's children. Their eldest was Cecilia Ruth Salisbury, followed by Thomas Daniel, followed by Irene Jasmine, the last child bearing the names of Chilena's grandmothers through her adoptive parents.

The fans of the show-business couple, ranging in age from ten to forty, held up data devices with touch-screens, through which Chilena and Dan's actual signatures could be stored. This represented no identity-theft hazard, since handwritten signatures had long since ceased to be used as a factor in legal identification of persons. Dan especially liked to do this, as it reminded their fans of the existence of cursive handwriting. The whole encounter was very good-natured, except when the oldest male fan present asked Chilena, in Dan's hearing, when she was going to quit this old-fashioned lifetime-faithfulness game and make herself available again. Careful not to make too "intolerant" a reply, since there was no knowing whether this man was really an undercover Pinkshirt looking for a chance to charge "hate speech," Chilena told him, "Probably about fifty years after I become too old and weak for anyone to be interested." (She used the word "weak" rather than "unattractive," in order to preclude accusations of appearance bigotry.)

At last they were inside the temple, and glad to be back. This was one of only five Oneness Temples in the whole Mid-Atlantic Federal District which was fully accredited for Christian worship. This meant that in this building there existed a physical copy of the Bible which did NOT have half its content removed; in fact, for the benefit of the Catholics who used this location every third Thursday, it included the Septuagint Old Testament books venerated by Catholics. But it also included a tiny device embedded in the spine, which would cause it to explode if anyone tried to take it out of the building.

Of course, no such thing had been done with the multiple copies of other holy books kept in the building; only with the Bible. Not counting surviving Bibles inside the Western Enclave, the Campaign Against Hate was allowing forty-seven hard copies of the complete Bible, of which thirteen were the Catholic canon, to exist in the entire D.S.A., all under the same restriction, and it considered this much Bible access a generous concession.

Pastor Wayne Schell greeted everyone. He was, or had been, part of the Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ movement, which had just been starting to succeed in restoring Biblical belief among Lutherans in America when it had been cut off by the Campaign Against Hate. As far as he himself knew, Pastor Schell was the only L.C.M.C. clergyman still allowed to practice ministry in the Diversity States, though L.C.M.C. churches were allowed to operate freely in Canada. When the congregation was seated, he mounted the pulpit.

"Welcome in the name of Jesus, newcomers and familiar faces. I am confident in the sincerity of everyone present, because no one can earn conformity points with the government by attending these meetings...."
 
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Continuing "Possible Future," which began on Page 67

Nearly half an hour was given to songs--every one of them pertaining to issues of salvation and holiness, which could scarcely be mentioned outside of this allotted place and time. The first was the traditional gospel song "Are You Washed In The Blood?", and the last was Keith Green's "To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice." For his sermon, then, Pastor Schell drew mainly upon the Book of Daniel--almost all of which was absent from the sanitized, toothless, abridged Bibles which were all that was permitted outside of these "accredited" temples.

"All of you have heard how Jesus told us not to pray publicly with a design to be noticed by others. This admonition is used by the regime to rationalize telling us to shut up. Of course, you all have also noticed how the shutting up is ONLY applied against us Christians, and against Biblically-oriented Jews; if we wanted to pray to anime-hologram characters, we could do that on Times Square on a Friday night. But Jesus uttered His words to a society in which prayer to the Living God was respected and approved of, so that a person COULD expect to be thought well of if he were known to be given to praying. It's another matter if you're living in conditions which make the act of prayer an act of dissent. Let us look at some Scripture that IS applicable to OUR circumstances." Here he read aloud the entire sixth chapter of Daniel.

Before he had finished, a teenage boy, here for the first time, whispered to his father more loudly than he had meant to, "Wow, I thought that the whole message of Daniel was that God wanted everyone to be vegetarians." Pastor Schell smiled, but otherwise kept going as if he had noticed nothing. After Daniel was safely out of the lions' cave, the preacher expounded:

"Long before this incident, Daniel had known how God rescued his three boyhood friends from being consumed in the great furnace; and more recently, he had come intact through the Persian capture of Babylon. So Daniel knew that God could protect His children from harm. But why did the prophet choose this particular hill to defend? Why was the matter of prayer the occasion for him to defy a tyrannical command? Why was it now that he put himself in a position where God would have to save him if he was not to die? He could have simply done his praying in secret, as Jesus would later advise in a different setting; and Darius, who favored Daniel, would not have gone out of his way to uncover so harmless a rebellion.

"It was because, although he had faithfully served the Medo-Persian administration that employed him, Daniel could not in conscience acquiesce, or even SEEM to acquiesce, to the notion that this earthly authority was actually superior to God. Nor would it honor God if Daniel were thought of as worshipping Him only when it was convenient. So Daniel purposely allowed himself to be seen praying to the God of Israel, knowing that his personal enemies would be on the lookout for this. In one and the same action, he was both proving that his first loyalty still was to the Almighty, AND proving again what was already known, that his loyalty to God was NOT injurious to the nation in any way. He was not praying in order to gain applause from men; he was insisting on GIVING his applause to the Lord. In the end, as you have heard, God vindicated His servant Daniel dramatically. But God expects the same loyalty from us, even if we DON'T enjoy special immunity to adverse earthly consequences.

"When your motive is to honor your Lord, never allow yourself be fooled by false accusations that your action is a matter of ego and vanity. We get little enough respect these days, that we can be sure that a public witness is not the path to popularity in society at large. Then again, Jesus also told us to be wise as serpents; therefore it is not necessarily sinful or cowardly if we don't throw our lives away on an impulse. Let everyone here seek the Holy Spirit's guidance as to when and where we take our stand. But woe to us if the Lord does give us a clear signal to defy evil as Daniel did, and we turn coward then!"

When the sermon ended, one more hymn followed: "The Son Of God Goes Forth To War." Pastor Schell remarked before they sang it that the words were obviously NOT calling for literal armed violence, but that they were calling for a resolute commitment to Jesus.

At the close of the service, while saying his goodbyes, Pastor Schell beckoned the Salisburys to his side, in order to tell them, "I had lunch yesterday with a Oneness Chaplain who serves in the correctional system. She knew that I knew you--of course, they make a point of knowing who knows whom--so she told me that your old friend Summer is to be released within a month. She wasn't sure about Summer's husband."

The namesake of the prophet highlighted in the sermon replied, "Thanks, Pastor. Chilena and I will be requesting permission to let Summer live with us until Evan is also released."
 
Dan and Chilena, with their children, rode the train back to their home neighborhood in the knowledge--or a reasonable confidence, anyway--that no penalty threatened them for listening to actual Christian preaching _inside_ an accredited location. The Fairness Party, which was the only political party permitted to exist in the Diversity States and which (through the Department of Indoctrination) controlled the Campaign Against Hate, had to retain a little bit of religious liberty, to satisfy the People's Republic of Greater China. For although the D.S.A. was not exactly _ruled_ by Beijing, it did owe its very existence and all its privileges to the complex international deal Beijing had proposed when the old U.S.A. had gone bankrupt beyond recovery. Since the Chinese had been creeping toward justice and freedom even as the Americans had been sinking into despotism, the former had forbidden the latter to eradicate Biblical faith completely--though allowing them _almost_ to eradicate it.

On the train, eleven-year-old Cecilia addressed her mother in the manner preferred by the Campaign Against Hate: "Caregiver..." but the mother knew that coming from her daughter, this chilly title meant the same thing as if Cecilia had said, "Mommy, I love you." What the child proceeded to say was, "If Citizen Summer Rand is going to be discharged from the Self-Esteem Center, does that mean that Unc--I mean, that Citizen Alipang Havens will also be allowed to come out of the Western Enclave?"

"I wish it did mean that," sighed Chilena. Profoundly though she loved her husband and children, she carried a starving hole in her spirit that bitterly missed her absent loved ones, and Alipang most of all. "But the Campaign Against Hate has judged that lots of people's teeth in northern Wyoming need to be rescued from hate, so your--so Citizen Alipang Havens is needed there."

Cecilia had had a crawful of Citizen This and Citizen That, so she simplified her next sentence. "Well, at least will Summer's children be allowed to come from the Brooklyn Tolerance House and join us?"

"That's a little more possible, anyway, since our home is in good standing."

"Then we'll--align our thoughts to the universal energies with that wish."

At home, Dan gathered the children around him for a storytelling session. Since it was risky, though not technically forbidden, to discuss the Bible at home, Dan had had his own solution for as long as the D.S.A. had existed: the indirect approach in teaching. Tonight he told a story about a researcher working for the Department of Eco-Sensitive Agriculture, who was conducting a field test on the latest genetically-modified strain of wheat intended to be issued to the collective farms. Some of the seeds were dropped on a nearby mag-lev track, where birds ate it; some seeds fell upon rocks which had been stripped of soil by evil corporate mining interests in the days before the Fairness Party saved the environment; some seeds fell among wild xericultural vegetation which was part of a different experiment; and some seeds fell into soil which was rendered fertile by the ecological consciousness of the people's collective.

This highly revised parable, for all the creativity Dan had put into it, would have been of no spiritual benefit at all to the Salisbury children--if not for the fact that these children already understood what aspects of it he wanted them to ignore.

As for the Brooklyn Tolerance House...Dan was eventually to learn that Summer's children _weren't_ there anymore.
 
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The next morning, Cecilia Salisbury had to go to Leon Trotsky Middle School once again. (Summer vacations for the school system had been reduced to three weeks, in contrast to adult workers having more vacation time than was ever known in American history.) As always, she was covered by her parents' prayers, and as always, she needed this covering.

She had scarcely set foot on the campus before she was confronted by a lantern-jawed boy twice her weight, although he bore the name of Butterfly. Whatever discomfort his ego might have suffered from this name, he made up for it by his pride in the red necktie he wore. He had not especially harassed Cecilia up to now; but apparently someone among Cecilia's enemies at school had put him up to something.

"Citizen Salisbury!" The boy's cracking voice interfered with his attempt to sound stern and adult. "You still haven't joined the Pioneers! Why are you so un-mutual?"

Cecilia gave a mental Amen to her parents' latest prayers for her. "Citizen Gambino, I'm sure you remember that the very first article of the charter of the Diversity Pioneers states that membership is not compulsory."

Butterfly's face plainly revealed the split-second pause his brain took, for purposes of intentionally rejecting truth and logic. "But non-membership is contrary to the collective spirit! By not belonging, you're judging everyone who does belong! That's the same as hate speech! That's why you Christians have to be restricted!" He added some observations which he considered brilliant, but which this narrative will not quote, concerning the girl's origins and habits.

Keeping her calm, Cecilia asked him, "Are you forced to join my church? Is anyone accusing you of un-mutual hate speech for not belonging to--?"

She didn't get to finish her question before Butterfly struck her in the face with a closed fist. She toppled like a falling tree; and she had not even hit the ground before two other girls, also wearing Pioneer neckties, were joining Butterfly in kicking her.

A female teacher walked up casually, allowing quite a few kicks to be landed before she laid righteously-indignant hands....on Cecilia. "You're picking a fight again! When will you stop making trouble?"

But she didn't get far with her intentionally dishonest pretense of a moral rebuke. She was interrupted by the Pinkshirt on duty--also a woman, but a bigger and stronger woman than the teacher. Many more students were gathering as the Pinkshirt barked, "You non-prioritized fool! Regardless of not being in the Pioneers, Cecilia Salisbury is affiliated with the chief export product of the Diversity States!" Glaring at Butterfly, she made it still plainer: "Citizen Gambino, the caregivers of the fellow citizen you assaulted are ACTORS!!!!"

The other pre-adolescents who now stood around all echoed the word "actors" as if it had a divine significance; then they piled onto Butterfly and his two friends, giving them a worse beating than the trio had given Cecilia.

Cecilia, meanwhile, was taken to the office of the school nurse, a man who actually had a traditional first name. With the Pinkshirt's authorization, the nurse bypassed the rationing protocols, to administer state-of-the-art aid to the injured girl. Nanobots, which would decompose harmlessly after six minutes, were injected into Cecilia's bloodstream, and in their brief life they accelerated cell repair and replacement in all traumatized tissues. By the time she reported to a classroom, Cecilia already showed almost no sign of having been hurt.

Only minimal care was given to Butterfly and his friends; but neither were they punished for their actions, beyond the punishment inflicted by the crowd.
 
Thank you, Annemarie. I assume you are still in the original story. Tell me honestly: do you think that I, as a writer forty years beyond my adolescence, have managed at least to come within a billion miles of depicting something like actual modern teenage experience? If not, I can always say, "It's just a fantasy!" :rolleyes:
 
Girls' names are worse. At least boys' names have stayed more or less traditional (Matthew, Jacob, etc.) Meanwhile, there are girls named the strangest things. I actually knew someone who named their girl "Stormy." Which is kind of weird since that was my horse's name.

Hopefully, no one will be naming their little boy "Butterfly" or "Daffodil" in real life.:eek:
 
I heard on the news one time that these people had named their kid Espn (pronounced ES-pen) after the sports channel. That really bugs me. Poor kid.
 
Dan and Chilena found enjoyable things to do with their children over the weekend, to take everyone's mind off of the abuse that Cecilia had suffered. This included a seashore excursion, on which they could watch naval warships that had formerly belonged to the United States, passing by on the horizon. These ships were now the property of the Greater Chinese Navy, and the Chinese enjoyed the irony of using them in routine patrols along the coastlines of North America.

Then Monday came: a school day for children, but the third day of an expanded weekend for most salaried workers in the Diversity States. Because of this Labor Department policy, parents and surrogate parents were typically free to visit their children's schools on Mondays. That is, if they dared to do so; most parents didn't, for fear that anything they said might be construed as criticizing the government.

But the parents of Cecilia Salisbury did care enough. They were frequent visitors to Leon Trotsky Middle School, and to Fidel Castro Elementary School where their two younger children attended. Even though they were known to be Christians, they still were always welcome visitors, because of what a novelty it was these days for movie stars to let themselves be seen in public anywhere. (Computer-graphic alterations to an actor's 2-D or 3-D appearance were so commonplace by now, that a star could enjoy a burgeoning career without any fan ever seeing what he or she really looked like; accordingly, the traditional reluctance of movie stars to let their human imperfections be seen was magnified because of being all the more indulged.)

The Salisburys sat in on Cecilia's morning classes, where their comments were solicited from time to time. But the most interesting occurrence happened at lunch time. They were going to eat with Cecilia, then go over to Castro Elementary; but Juanita Porres, the Principal of Trotsky, asked attention from them and everyone before permission to start eating was given.

"Students and caregivers, we ask for a moment of your time, in which one of our students has something to say. Chilena and Daniel Salisbury, this is Butterfly Gambino;" and she waved the hefty boy forward to approach the table where Cecilia sat with her parents.

Dropping to all fours, the bully tapped his forehead on the floor in a mild version of a Chinese kowtow. This was not being done as a joke; Butterfly had been ordered in earnest to act this meek and contrite, lest he find himself in a Tolerance House. When he lifted his eyes, he looked only at Chilena, utterly ignoring Dan. "Citizen Salisbury, I ask your forgiveness for my act of male chauvinism, sexism, intolerance, bigotry, patriarchal oppression and linear thinking. Please accept my promise that not only will I never offend any female again, but also I will rededicate myself to the eradication of masculine tribalism."

There was no sign of any rebuke to, or apology by, the two girls who had joined in assaulting Cecilia. Those two of course were in the cafeteria; Cecilia could see them looking smug over their going unpunished.

Everyone present knew, and everyone present knew that everyone else present knew, that Cecilia being a girl and Butterfly being a boy had not in any way been the motivation for the assault, not in the slightest degree. Everyone knew that the motivation for the crime had been exclusively and entirely a matter of picking on Cecilia for being a nonconformist. Everyone knew that children who didn't join the Pioneers were treated as fair game for persecution, with the full blessing of the public school system. But this time, the victim had been the daughter of movie stars; therefore, a concession was being made to the caregivers' feelings--if it could be done in a politically correct manner which did not indict the system.

Chilena knew that this was the best offer they were going to get, and that the girl bullies, though unpunished, would at least be discouraged henceforth from troubling Cecilia, provided that right now Chilena played along with the false interpretation of the incident on Friday. So she laid a hand lightly on Butterfly's shoulder, saying, "We accept your apology, Citizen Gambino. And we wish you success in finding the most constructive path in life." This was as close to telling him "We'll pray for your conversion" as she could get away with.

Later, as they were on their way to Castro, Dan remarked to his wife, "I seem to recall an old saying: 'Mankind progresses on partial successes.' God willing, modest partial victories like this will count for something bigger."

Both of them wished they could believe this.
 
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