First Meetings Read online

  Poland in particular, but he never said that to anyone, never even admitted that he had spent the first six years of his life in Poland. His documents all showed him and his whole family to be natural-born Americans. His parents’ unlosable Polish accents proved that to be a lie, but considering that it was the Hegemony that had moved them to America and given them their false papers, it wasn’t likely anybody was going to press the issue.

  So write your diagrams on the board, Little Miss I-Want-to-Grow-Up-to-Be-a-Perfesser. I’ll ace your tests and get my A and you’ll never have a clue that the most arrogant, ambitious, and intelligent student on this campus was in your class.

  At least that’s what they told him he was back when they were recruiting him. All except the arrogant part. They didn’t actually say that. He just read it in their eyes.

  “I wrote all this on the board,” said the grad student with chalk, “because I want you to memorize it and, with any luck, understand it, because it’s the basis of everything else we’ll discuss in this class.”

  John Paul had already memorized it, of course, just by reading it. Because it was stuff he hadn’t seen before in his outside reading, it was obvious her “method” was to try to be “cutting edge,” full of the latest—and most likely to be wrong—research.

  She looked right at him. “You seem particularly bored and contemptuous, Mr.…Wiggin, is it? Is that because you already know about the community selection model of evolution?”

  Oh, great. She was one of those “teachers” who had to have a goat in the class—someone to torment in order to score points.

  “No, ma’am,” said John Paul. “I came here hoping that you’d teach me everything about it.” He kept every trace of sarcasm out of his tone; but of course that made it even more barbed and condescending.

  He expected her to show annoyance at him, but instead she merely turned to another student and began a dialogue. So either John Paul had scared her off, or she had been oblivious to his sarcasm and therefore had no idea she had been challenged.

  The class wouldn’t even be interesting as a blood sport. Too bad.

  “ ‘Human evolution is driven by community needs,’ ” she read from the board. “How is that possible, since genetic information is passed only by and to individuals?”

  She was answered by the normal undergraduate silence. Fear of appearing stupid? Fear of seeming to care? Fear of seeming to be a suck-up? Of course, a few of the silent students were honestly stupid or apathetic, but most of them lived fear-driven lives.

  Finally a tentative hand went up.

  “Do communities, um, influence sexual selection? Like slanting eyes?”

  “They do,” said Miss Grad Student, “and the prevalence of the epicanthic fold in East Asia is a good example of that. But ultimately that’s trivial—there is no actual survival value in it. I’m talking about good old rock-solid survival of the fittest. How can that be controlled by the community?”

  “Killing people who don’t fit in?” suggested another student.

  John Paul slid down in his seat and stared at the ceiling. This far into their education, and they still had no understanding of basic principles.

  “Mr. Wiggin seems to be bored with our discussion,” said Miss Grad Student.

  John Paul opened his eyes and scanned the board again. Ah, she had written her name there. Theresa Brown. “Yes, Ms. Brown, I am,” he said.

  “Is this because you know the answer, or because you don’t care?”

  “I don’t know the answer,” said John Paul, “but neither does anyone else in the room except you, so until you decide to tell us instead of engaging in this enchanting voyage of discovery in which you let the passengers steer the ship, it’s naptime.”

  There were a few gasps and a couple of chuckles.

  “So you have no ideas about how the statement on the board might be either true or false?”

  “I suppose,” said John Paul, “that the theory you’re suggesting is that because living in communities makes humans far more likely to survive, and to have opportunities to mate, and to bring their children to adulthood, then whatever individual human traits strengthen the community will, in the long run, be the ones most likely to get passed along to each new generation.”

  She blinked. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right.” And then she blinked again. Apparently he had interrupted her lesson plan by getting to the answer immediately.

  “But what I wonder,” said John Paul, “is this: Since human communities depend on adaptability in order to thrive, then it isn’t just one set of traits that strengthen the community. So community life should promote variety, not a narrow range of traits.”

  “That would be true,” said Ms. Brown, “and indeed is true in the main, except that there are only a few types of human communities that actually survive long enough to improve the chances of individual survival.”

  She walked to the board and wiped out a swath of material that John Paul had just blown through by cutting to the chase. In its place, she wrote two headings: TRIBAL and CIVIL.

  “There are two models that all successful human communities follow,” she said. Then she turned to John Paul. “How would you define a ‘successful’ community, Mr. Wiggin?”

  “One that maximized the ability of its members to survive and reproduce,” he said.

  “Oh, if only that were true,” she said. “But it’s not true. Most human communities demand anti-survival behavior from large numbers of their members. The obvious example would be war, in which members of a community risk their own death—usually at the very age when they are about to begin family life. Many of them die. How can you possibly pass on the willingness to die before reproduction? Those who have this trait are the least likely to reproduce.”

  “But only males,” said John Paul.

  “There are women in the military, Mr. Wiggin.”

  “In very small numbers,” said John Paul, “because the traits that make good soldiers are far less common in women, and the willingness to go to war is rare in women.”

  “Women fight savagely and die willingly to protect their children,” said Ms. Brown.

  “Exactly—their children. Not the community as a whole,” said John Paul. He was making this up as he went along, but it made sense and was interesting—so he was quite willing to let her play the Socratic questioning game.

  “And yet women are the ones who form the tightest community bonds,” she said.

  “And the most rigid hierarchies,” said John Paul. “But they do it by social sanctions, not by violence.”

  “So you’re saying that violence in males but civility in women is promoted by community life.”

  “Not violence,” said John Paul. “But the willingness to sacrifice for a cause.”

  “In other words,” said Ms. Brown, “men believe the stories their communities tell them. Enough to die and kill. And women don’t?”

  “They believe them enough to…” John Paul paused a moment, thinking back on what he knew about learned and unlearned sex differences. “Women have to be willing to raise their sons in a community that might require them to die. So men and women all have to believe the story.”

  “And the story they believe,” said Ms. Brown, “is that males are expendable and females are not.”

  “To a degree, anyway.”

  “And why would this be a useful story for a community to believe?” She directed this question to the class at large.

  And the answers came quickly enough, because some of the students, at least, were following the conversation. “Because even if half the men die, all the women will still be able to reproduce.” “Because it provides an outlet for male aggressiveness.” “Because you have to be able to defend the community’s resources.”

  John Paul watched as Theresa Brown fielded each response and riffed on it.

  “Do communities that suffered terrible losses in war in fact abandon monogamy or do a large number of women live their lives
without reproducing?” She had the example of France, Germany, and Britain after the bloodletting of World War I.

  “Does war come about because of male aggressiveness? Or is male aggressiveness a trait that communities have to promote in order to win wars? Is it the community that drives the trait, or the trait that drives the community?” Which John Paul realized was the very crux of the theory she was putting forth—and he rather liked the question.

  “And what,” she finally asked, “are the resources a community has to protect?”

  Food, they said. Water. Shelter. But these obvious answers did not seem to be what she was looking for. “All these are important, but you’re missing the most important one.”

  To his own surprise, John Paul found himself wanting to come up with the right answer. He had never expected to feel that way in a class taught by a grad student.

  What community resource could be more important to the survival of the community than food, water, or shelter?

  He raised his hand.

  “Mr. Wiggin seems to think he knows.” She looked at him.

  “Wombs,” he said.

  “As a community resource,” she said.

  “As the community,” said John Paul. “Women are community.”

  She smiled. “That is the great secret.”

  There were howls of protest from other students. About how men have always run most communities. How women were treated like property.

  “Some men,” she answered. “Most men are treated far more like property than women. Because women are almost never simply thrown away, while men are thrown away by the thousands in time of war.”

  “But men still rule,” a student protested.

  “Yes, they do,” said Ms. Brown. “The handful of alpha males rule, while all the other males become tools. But even the ruling males know that the most vital resource of the community is the women, and any community that is going to survive has to bend all its efforts to one primary task—to promote the ability of women to reproduce and bring their offspring to adulthood.”

  “So what about societies that selectively abort or kill off their girl children?” insisted a student.

  “Those would be societies that had decided to die, wouldn’t they?” said Ms. Brown.

  Consternation. Uproar.

  It was an interesting model. Communities that killed off their girls would have fewer girls reach reproductive age. Therefore they would be less successful in maintaining a high population. He raised his hand.

  “Enlighten us, Mr. Wiggin,” she said.

  “I just have a question,” he said. “Couldn’t there be an advantage in having an excess of males?”

  “It must not be an important one,” said Ms. Brown, “because the vast majority of human communities—especially the ones that survive longest—have shown a willingness to throw away males, not females. Besides, killing female babies gives you a higher proportion of males, but a lower absolute number of males, because there are fewer females to give birth to them.”

  “But what about when resources are scarce?” a student asked.

  “What about it?” said Ms. Brown.

  “I mean, don’t you have to reduce the population to sustainable levels?”

  Suddenly the room was very quiet.

  Ms. Brown laughed. “Anyone want to try an answer to that?”

  No one spoke.

  “And why have we suddenly become silent?” she asked.

  She waited.

  Finally someone murmured, “The population laws.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Politics. We have a worldwide decision to decrease the human population by limiting the number of births to two per couple. And you don’t want to talk about it.”

  The silence said that they didn’t even want to talk about the fact that they didn’t want to talk about it.

  “The human race is fighting for its survival against an alien invasion,” she said, “and in the process, we have decided to limit our reproduction.”

  “Somebody named Brown,” said John Paul, “ought to know how dangerous it can be to go on record as opposing the population laws.”

  She looked at him icily. “This is a science class, not a political debate,” she said. “There are community traits that promote survival of the individual, and individual traits that promote the survival of the community. In this class, we are not afraid to go where the evidence takes us.”

  “What if it takes us out of any chance of getting a job?” asked a student.

  “I’m here to teach the students who want to learn what I know,” she said. “If you’re one of that happy number, then aren’t we both lucky. If you’re not, I don’t much care. But I’m not going to not teach you something because knowing it might somehow make you less employable.”

  “So is it true,” asked a girl in the front row, “that he really is your father?”

  “Who?” asked Ms. Brown.

  “You know,” the girl said. “Hinckley Brown.”

  Hinckley Brown. The military strategist whose book was still the bible of the International Fleet—but who resigned from the I.F. and went into seclusion because he refused to go along with the population laws.

  “And this would be relevant to you because…?” asked Ms. Brown.

  The answer was belligerent. “Because we have a right to know if you’re teaching us science or your religion.”

  That’s right, thought John Paul. Hinckley Brown was a Mormon, and they were noncompliant.

  Noncompliant like John Paul’s own parents, who were Polish Catholics.

  Noncompliant like John Paul intended to be, as soon as he found somebody he wanted to marry. Somebody who also wanted to stick it to the Hegemony and their two-children-per-family law.

  “What if,” said Ms. Brown, “the findings of science happen to coincide, on a particular point, with the beliefs of a religion? Do we reject the science in order to reject the religion?”

  “What if the science gets influenced by the religion?” demanded the student.

  “Fortunately,” said Ms. Brown, “the question is not only stupid and offensive, it’s also moot. Because whatever blood relationship I might or might not have with the famous Admiral Brown, the only thing that matters is my science and, if you happen to be suspicious, my religion.”

  “So what is your religion?” the student said.

  “My religion,” said Ms. Brown, “is to try to falsify all hypotheses. Including your hypothesis that teachers should be judged according to their parentage or their membership in a group. If you find me teaching something that cannot be adduced from the evidence, then you can make your complaint. And since it seems particularly important to you to avoid any possibility of an idea contaminated by Hinckley Brown’s beliefs, I will drop you from the class…right…now.”

  By the end of the sentence she was jabbing instructions at her desk, which was sitting atop the podium. She looked up. “There. You can leave now and go to the department offices to arrange to be admitted to a different section of this class.”

  The student was flabbergasted. “I don’t want to drop this class.”

  “I don’t recall asking you what you wanted,” said Ms. Brown. “You’re a bigot and a troublemaker, and I don’t have to keep you in my class. That goes for the rest of you. We will follow the evidence, we will challenge ideas, but we will not challenge the personal life of the teacher. Anyone else want to drop?”

  In that moment, John Paul Wiggin fell in love.

  Theresa let the exhilaration of Human Community carry her for several hours. The class hadn’t started well—the Wiggin boy looked to be a troublemaker. But it turned out he was as smart as he was arrogant, and it sparked the brightest kids in the class, and all in all it was exactly the kind of thing Theresa had always loved about teaching: a group of people thinking the same thoughts, conceiving the same universe, becoming, for just a few moments, one.

  The Wiggin “boy.” She had to laugh at her own attitude. She was proba
bly younger than he was. But she felt so old. She’d been in grad school for several years now, and it felt as if the weight of the world were on her shoulders. It wasn’t enough to have her own career to worry about, there was the constant pressure of her father’s crusade. Everything she did was interpreted by everyone as if her father were speaking through her, as if he somehow controlled her mind and heart.

  Why shouldn’t they think so? He did.

  But she refused to think about him. She was a scientist, even if she was a bit on the theoretical side. She was not a child anymore. More to the point, she was not a soldier in his army, a fact that he had never recognized and never would—especially now that his “army” was so small and weak.

  Then she got beeped for a meeting with the dean.

  Grad students didn’t get called in for meetings with the dean. And the fact that the secretary claimed to have no idea what the meeting was about or who else would be there filled her with foreboding.

  The late summer weather was quite warm, even this far north, but since Theresa lived an indoor life she rarely noticed it. Certainly she hadn’t dressed for the afternoon temperature. She was dripping with sweat by the time she got to the graduate school offices, and instead of having a few minutes in the air-conditioning to cool down, the secretary rushed her right into the dean’s office.

  Worse and worse.

  There was the dean and her entire dissertation committee. And Dr. Howell, who had apparently returned from retirement just for this occasion. Whatever this occasion was.

  They barely took time for the basic courtesies before they broke the news to her. “The foundation has decided to withdraw funding unless we remove you from the project.”

  “On what grounds?” she asked.

  “Your age, mostly,” said the dean. “You are extraordinarily young to be running a research project of this scope.”

  “But it’s my project. It only exists because I thought of it.”

  “I know it seems unfair,” said the dean. “But we won’t let this interfere with your progress toward your doctorate.”