“It’s no good against Starak, of course.” Morgan took the proffered bottle carefully. “We’ll do what we can.”
“So will we.”
No one offered to shake hands. Lessing led the way outside, and the others followed. He dropped his little pill casually into his shirt pocket; you never knew when such a thing might come in handy. Jameela slid into the back scat of the limousine, while Morgan joined the driver in front.
“That was a cute bit of one-up-manship,” Lessing remarked to Morgan, “the humanitarian Black lady scientist bit.”
Morgan twisted around to skewer him with a stare. “She happens to be trained in White-developed scientific methods in a White educational system, and she works with White-created theories, instruments, and materials. She is a product, wholly and solely, of White inventiveness and enterprise! And,” he added, “she also happens to be a decent person. We ‘Hogboes’ don’t have a monopoly on decency.”
“How nice of you to admit it,” Jameela remarked. “The result of a good environment, no doubt, living so close to her White colleagues.”
Morgan refused to rise to the bait. “Environment’s a major factor. There’re also extremes in any population… the bell curve, you know: superior members and inferior ones. It’s when you compare two bell curves that you can reach meaningful conclusions about differences between whole groups. This Dr. Kirk is probably way above the mean on any scale. To exceptional genes, add the advantages of a supportive home environment, a good education, scholarships, professional employment, and the like. Such an individual can hardly lose! But take a look at a ghetto some time if you want to see the other side of the story.”
“No worse than the White slums of nineteenth-century England!”
“As I said: environment helps or hinders what you inherit.”
“Judging by the number of Black lawyers, scientists, scholars, artists, businessmen, administrators, and what-all these days, the environment is doing just fine.”
“True, but who created it in the first place? Who’s maintaining it now?”
“Why don’t you settle for a multi-racial state? Why waste potential? Why separate the races? Every person has something to offer, some talent society can use.”
“Remember that the ‘homeland’ idea is the Khalifa’s, lady! Fifty-sixty years ago some White groups offered to separate and form a mono-racial White state in the Pacific Northwest where they wouldn’t bother the liberals and their friends. Now it’s the Khalifa who wants it the other way around.”
“You haven’t answered me. Why separation at all?”
“Simple: we can’t assimilate them, or they us. We’re different: we can communicate, even be friends. But they can never be us. They’re visible, as the Khalifa said, and they’re also genetically and culturally distinct. A homogeneous community works better than a heterogeneous one, and a state must answer to its people’s collective will. Our ethnos demands a just and democratic system, where our citizens will pull together in the same direction. We can’t achieve that as long as society is a muddle of squabbling, mutually mistrust-ful components.”
“You don’t argue that Blacks and others are genetically inferior, then?”
“They’re different. Not a lot, as an elephant is different from a mouse, but in small, subtle ways that don’t show up until you see them in the aggregate. Anyhow, it’s impossible to define ‘inferior’ except in reference to specific characteristics. Some minorities may find it possible to merge into our ethnos; others cannot, as I said. It’s best for the latter to go apart and live elsewhere, with as little friction as possible. Both they and we will benefit.”
“Why can’t such minorities coexist within your society, as Hindus, Jains, Indian Christians, and Sikhs exist in India?”
Morgan slapped the leather back of the car seat with glee. “Gotcha this time, lady! You yourself are living proof that coexist- ence doesn’t work! You and the Hindus come from pretty much the same stock, speak the same languages, eat the same food, and follow similar customs, but you’re an economic threat to them, and you belong to a different ethnos! That’s why you people have been at each other’s throats for so many centuries! Coexistence? Oh, yeah, tell me all about it!”
“There are historical reasons!”
“There always are. Once everybody recognizes that our ethnos rules in our territory, we can coexist with some of our minorities, we can be friends with other ethnos groups and states, and we can cooperate in building a multi-ethnos world. As time goes on, we think our ethnos will prevail, and others will disappear, as I’ve told you before.”
Jamcela’s eyes glittered. “Why not just interbreed now? Save yourselves the trouble of separation, accommodation, assimilation again… and bloody race-wars along the way?”
“Because wedon’t think racial intermixing is genetically benefi-cial, and it also causes unnecessary cultural tensions… at a time when we’re facing other horrendous problems. Even if all of the other ethnos groups in the world do eventually assimilate to ours, we will still want to maintain genetic separation between the major racial groups. We think that’s best for the species!”
Lessing had had all he could take. He cried, “Oh, shut up, both of you! Enough, goddamn it! ” With difficulty he captured Jameela’s wrist and made hushing noises until she subsided. Morgan grinned, raised an eyebrow, then turned back to stare primly forward out of the front window. Ensley said nothing, though they could see his eyes upon them in the driver’s mirror.
Lessing came to another decision: he and Jameela would never be happy here, not with these one-note ideologues. It wouldn’t work.
They did not speak as they sped back north along the littered, crumbling freeway. The clouds of yellow pollution that had obscured the city in the morning had scudded out to sea to be replaced by steel-dark thunderheads. The earth smelled wet, smoky, and acrid, like gasoline and garbage and chemicals. It reminded Lessing of Lucknow, except that the sweeter fragrances of burning charcoal and spices were missing. In the mountains to the east thunder boomed like muted artillery fire. That evoked other, less pleasant memories.
They awoke in the night to more thundering outside; this was man-made, however, and not celestial. Lessing switched on the TV and listened to an all-night newscaster gabble excitedly about rioting in the Chicano barrios, about Black “whangoes” down near Walts, about police and National Guard actions and reactions, about guns and firebombs and hatred.
Always hatred: the human condition.
What saved humanity were the parallel qualities of hope and love. It would be nice to be able to add “and forgiveness,” but it didn’t seem that there was much of that around.
He stayed awake, blinking owl-eyed at the screen, long after Jameela had become a sleeping jumble of sandalwood-fragrant, black, silken tresses amidst the outrageous, pink pillows.
Pacov and Starak had not destroyed Western civilization, not with a bang, nor even with a whimper. They might have unbalanced the central flywheel, however. Now centrifugal force would gradually send the outer, looser pieces hurtling away, and at last the whole thing would whirl into fragments like a fireworks pinwheel on the Fourth of July. What would remain of humanity’s vaunted enterprise then?
Nothing but dying sparks scattered here and there upon the all-enveloping, terrifying, ever-encroaching, velvet dark.
He had to get himself and Jameela out of here, out of this decaying, hate-filled — and hateful — city, out of the United States and Europe, out of Asia, too, for that matter! He should have resigned back in April in New Orleans.