She suddenly smiled and gave a little skip of pleasure at her own success in the brief recitation.
“Very good,” Gideon approved.
A boy next to Sarah, about her own age, raised his hand. “I should like to ask you, sir—”
Norman felt inclined to let his mind wander. No doubt this was one of the regular public-relations jobs Gideon had to cope with when he went about the country in this incredibly informal manner—which struck Norman as absurd: the First Secretary of the U. S. Embassy stopping off at random in an isolated village and chatting with children! But he had his mind too full trying to organise his perceptions.
He had discovered why organising them was so difficult a few seconds ago. The sight of a corpse being made ready for burial, matter-of-factly in the view of everyone, was a shock to him. In sterile modern America one was intellectually aware that death could be a public event, from heart-failure or more messily through the intervention of a mucker, but hardly anyone had actually seen a mucker on the rampage, and emotionally and for all daily purposes one assumed it was something that took place tidily in a hospital out of sight of everyone except experts trained to handle human meat.
But people do die.
In the same way, Beninia was a continuing shock. Taken in by eye and ear, the canned information supplied by Shalmaneser and the GT library was manipulable, digestible, of a familiar sort. Confronted with language, smell, local diet, the sticky hot early-summer air, the clutch of mud around his shoes, he was in the same plight as a Bushman trying to make sense of a photograph, exhausted by the effort to bridge the gap between pre-known symbol and present actuality.
Yet it had to be done. Isolated in the air-conditioned GT tower, one might juggle for a thousand years with data from computers and pattern them into a million beautiful logical arrays. But you had to get out on the ground and see if the data were accurate before you could put over the programming switches on Shalmaneser from “hypothetical” to “real”.
His attention shot back to here and now as though a similar switch had been pulled in his own mind. He had heard, in memory, the rest of the boy’s question.
“—how the Chinese can do so much damage in California!”
Gideon was looking baffled. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you,” he said after a moment.
“You must forgive the child, sir,” the teacher said, plainly embarrassed. “It’s not the most tactful subject—”
“I’ll answer any question, tactless or not,” Gideon said. “I didn’t quite follow, that’s all.”
“Well, sir,” the boy said, “we have a television set here, and teacher makes us older ones watch the news programme after school before we walk home, so we see a lot about America. And there’s often a piece about damage done by Chinese infiltrators in California. But if Americans are either like you, or like English people, and the Chinese are like what we see on television, with their funny eyes and different skins, why can’t you recognise and catch them?”
“I get the point,” Norman said gruffly. “Like me to handle that, Gideon?” He pushed himself away from the roof of the car where he had been leaning and approached the group of children, his eyes on the questioner. Not more than thirteen at the oldest, yet he had phrased his inquiry in first-class English with a slight British inflection. Learned off one of the Common Europe news-commentators, probably. Still, it was an achievement at his age.
“What’s your name, prodgy?”
“Simon, sir. Simon Bethakazi.”
“Well, Simon, you’re probably old enough by now to know how it feels when you do something silly you wouldn’t like other people to find out about. Not because you’d be punished, but because people would laugh at you—or because they thought of you as one of the cleverest boys in the school and a clever boy oughtn’t to have done such a stupid thing. Catch?”
Simon nodded, face very intent.
“Only sometimes things happen which are too big to hide. Suppose you—hmmm! Suppose you knocked over a jug of milk and that was all the milk in the house? And it was your fault but you’d been doing something silly to make it happen, like seeing if you could hang by your feet from the rafters.”
Simon looked blank for a second and the teacher, smiling, said something in Shinka. His face cleared and he had to repress a grin.
“Well—you might try and put the blame on someone else … No, you wouldn’t do that, I’m sure; you’re a good boy. You might try and blame it on a pig that tripped you up, or a chicken that startled you and made you fall over.
“The Chinese would have to be very clever indeed to do all the damage they’re supposed to. But because America is a big and rich and proud country we don’t like admitting that there are some people who aren’t happy—who are so unhappy, in fact, they want to change the way things are run. But there are only a few of them, not enough to make the changes happen. So they lose their tempers and they break things, same as people do anywhere.
“And there are some other people who would also like to change things, but who haven’t got around to using bombs yet, or setting houses on fire. If they thought there were many more like themselves, they might decide to start too. So we like to let it be thought that it’s really someone else’s fault. Do you understand?”
“It may be a trifle sophisticated for him,” the teacher said aside to Norman.
“No, I understand.” Simon was emphatic. “I’ve seen somebody lose his temper. It was when I went to stay with my cousin in the north last year. I saw an Inoko lady and gentleman having a quarrel.”
Incredulous words rose to Norman’s lips. Before he could utter them, however, Gideon had coughed politely.
“If you’ll excuse us, we have to get on our way,” he said.
“Of course,” the teacher beamed. “Many thanks for your kindness. Class, three cheers for our visitors! Hip hip—”
* * *
Back on the road, Norman said, “And what would State think of that—uh—presentation?”
“It was honest,” Gideon said with a shrug. “It’s hardly what they’ll hear over the TV, but it’s honest.”
Norman hesitated. “There was something I wanted to ask, but it seems foolish … The hole! Why was young Simon so eager to stress that he’d seen someone lose his temper?”
“That’s a very bright kid. And sophisticated.”
“Anyone could see he’s no simpleton! But I asked—”
“He could say that in English. He couldn’t have said it in Shinka, which is his native language, and that’s good for a boy barely into his teens, isn’t it?”
Norman shook his head in bewilderment.
“Ask this linguist—what’s his name? The one you brought with you.”
“Derek Quimby.”
“Ah-hah. Ask him if you can express the idea of losing your temper in Shinka. You can’t. You can only use the word which means ‘insane’.”
“But—”
“I’m telling you.” Gideon guided the car around a wide curve, seeking a route between potholes. “I don’t speak the language well myself, but I can get along. Facts are: you can say ‘annoyed’ or even ‘exasperated’, but both those words came originally from roots meaning ‘creditor’. Someone you get angry with owes you an apology in the same way you’re owed money or a cow. You can say ‘crazy’ and put one of two modifiers on the front of it—either the root for ‘amusing’ or the root for ‘tears’. In the latter case, you’re talking about someone who’s hopelessly out of his mind, sick, to be tended and cleaned up after. In the former, you’re inviting people to laugh at someone who’s lost his temper, but will return to normal sooner or later.”
“They regard anger as being literal insanity?”
“They don’t regard it as being important enough to have a separate word to label it, that’s all I can say.”