A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

foggy. Ike
     looked from the holovid to the serene illusory New England and saw the true shelter that lay behind it, holding them safe,
     safe and free, in haven. The truth shall make you free, he thought and, putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders, he said
     it aloud.
    She hugged him back and said, “You’re a dear,” reducing the great statement to the merely personal, but it pleased him all
     the same. As he went off to the elevator bank he realized that he was happy—absolutely happy. The negative ions in the atmosphere
     would have something to do with that, he reminded himself. But it was more than just bodily. It was what man had sought so
     long and never found, never could find, on earth: a rational happiness. Down there, all they had ever had was life, liberty,
     and the pursuit. Now they didn’t even have that. The Four Horsemen pursued them through the dust of a dying world. And once
     more that strange word came into his mind: spared. We have been spared.
    In the third quarter of the second year of Spes, a school curriculum revision meeting was called. Ike attended as a concerned
     parent, Susan as parent and part-time teacher (nutrition was her hi-pri), and Esther because teenagers were invited as part
     of the policy of non-infantilization and her father wanted her to be there. The Education Committee chairman, Dick Allardice,
     gave a goals-and-achievements talk, and a few teachers had reports and suggestions to make. Ike spoke briefly about increasing
     AI instruction. It was all routine until Sonny Wigtree got up. Sonny was a drawling, smiling good ole boy from the CSA with
     four or five degrees from good universities and a mind like a steel trap lined with razors. “Ah’d lahk to know,” he said,
     all soft and self-deprecating, “whut y’all bin thankin about goan oan teachin jollajy? Y’know? An lahk thet.”
    Ike was still mentally translating into his own Connecticutdialect when Sam Henderson got up to reply. Geology was one of Sam’s subspecialties. “What do you mean, Sonny,” he said in
     his Ohio twang, “are you proposing to take geology out of the curriculum?”
    “Ah was jes askin what y’all thought?”
    Ike could translate that easily: Sonny had got the key votes lined up and was about to make his move. Sam, knowing the language,
     played along: “Well, I personally think it’s well worth discussing.”
    Alison Jones-Kurawa, who taught earth sciences to the Level Threes, leaped up, and Ike expected the predictable emotional
     defense—must not let the children of Spes grow up ignorant of the Home Planet, etc. But Alison argued rationally enough that
     a scientific understanding limited to the composition and contents of Spes itself was dangerously over-abstract. “If down
     the line we decide to terraform the moon, for example, instead of building the Big Ship—hadn’t they better know what a rock
     is?” Point taken, Ike thought, but still beside the point, because the point was not the necessity of geology in the curriculum,
     but the influence of Sonny Wigtree, John Padopoulos, and John Kelly on the Education Committee. The discourse concerned power,
     and the teachers didn’t understand it; few women did. The outcome was as predictable as the discussion. The only unexpected
     thing was John Kelly’s jumping Mo Orenstein. Mo argued that the earth was a laboratory for Spes and ought to be used as such,
     going off into a story of how his chemistry class had learned to identify a whole series of reactions by cooking a pebble,
     which he had brought from Mount Sinai as a souvenir and as a lab specimen—”following the principle of multiple purpose, you
     see, use plus sentiment—” at which point John Kelly broke in abruptly, “All right! The subject’s geology, not ethnicity!”
     and while Mo was silent, taken aback by John’s tone, Padopoulos made the motion.
    “Mo seems to get under John Kelly’s hide,” Ike said as they went down A Corridor to the