A Creed for the Third Millennium Read Online Free PDF Page A

them to see
what could be done with an unheated, naturally lightless, largely airless house
through the long months of winter.
    'The SCB is vile!' cried Mama now,
summoning tears. 'What do those heartless wretches of men in Washington know
about the needs of women?'
    'Mama, Mama, why do you persist in saying
such things?' asked Dr Christian, irritated. 'Why shouldn't they know,
for pity's sake? For that matter, how do you know they're men? And why, even if
they are men, should any man feel the sorrow of enforced barrenness less than a
woman? Do I have a clinic full of women patients? Do I? Mama, next door is
fifty-fifty, women and men! And railing against fate is not the answer.
The Second Child Bureau was a sop they threw us in return for our peacefully
signing the Delhi Treaty, and in my opinion the SCB has turned out the worst
feature of that whole miserable, humiliating decade! You should remember the
time a great deal better than I do, Mama, you were a grown woman where I was a
child.'
    'Augustus Rome sold us out,' she said,
teeth clenched.
    'Oh, Mama! We sold ourselves out! Listen
to one of your generation talk, and you'd swear it fell on us like a bolt out of
the blue. It did not! We sowed the seeds of Gus Rome and the Delhi Treaty way
back in the past. Ninety years ago, when our population stood at a hundred and
fifty million, we were at the apex of our power — and our pride. We had
everything. And what did we do? We threw our money around like it was going out
of style, and the world hated us for it. We held up our know-how as the
ultimate, and the world hated us for it. We offered the peoples of the world a
way of life they had neither the means nor the talent to imitate, and the world
hated us for it. We fought foreign wars in the names of justice and freedom, and
the world hated us for it, not least the peoples we fought for — and I'm not
thereby saying the wars we fought were always altruistic, but a great many of
our little folk believed they were. And even as we went on deluding ourselves
with outmoded thinking — martial and altruistic! — at one and the same
time we were busy making orthodox war an impossibility, plague a thing of the past,
religion a laughing stock, and people into digital ciphers.'
    He was away, and the sofa was too
confining, so he got to his feet in the ungainly yet oddly graceful series of
unwindings his abnormally long bones demanded, and he paced a room never
designed for pacing, in and out of leaves that shuddered in the breeze of his
fevered progress, rattling pots, sending pedestals a-quaking, while his family
sat in utter thrall, pinned on the thunder of his voice and the lightning of his
eyes; his sister stunned by fear of him and shame of herself, his sisters-in-law
consumed with admiration, his brothers incapable of resenting him, and his
mother — ah! his mother screaming away inside her quiet face with a gargantuan
triumph. For when his passions cohabited with his intellect and he began to
speak, he worked a magic on his listeners that galvanized them. Even in this
most intimate of circles, composed solely of the people who had been hearing him
in full spate for years on years, still he had the power to transfix.
    'I don't remember the dawn of the third
millennium, because I was literally born in it. But what did it bring? There
were those who sang hymns and prepared to die in the blaze of the Second Coming,
there were those who sang anthems and prepared to live in the blaze of
technological mastery of the universe. But what did it bring? Pain.
Impotence. Anticlimax. Reality! A reality harder and crueller and more
unendurable than any reality in the history of our planet since the Black Death.
We were cooling down in a hurry. God knows why! No one else seems to. The best
explanation the best men can offer is a mini ice age. Oh, they talk of currents
and atmospheric layers, continental plates and reversing magnetic poles,