Heir to the Glimmering World Read Online Free PDF Page B

out of work, and I knew this fellow at the hospital who had a connection over there. It seemed the right thing. Her father's a math teacher, where else could he go?"
    "In this system he could go out and dig ditches, that's what. A decent government would provide something."
    "Ninel, the fellow was in trouble, and he had the girl—"
    "To keep a place like that in business! It's just a contamination. Posh kids, offspring of the oligarchy. They're being trained to exploit, that's all. A cadet corps for the banks. Schools like that should be burned to the ground."
    Gradually the other women Bertram had been bringing home vanished. Now it was only Ninel. One night during our meal I asked her what her real name was. She hooked her thumbs into the loops of her woven-straw belt and blew out a sigh of disgust. "Miriam," she told me, "but don't you ever dare use it." This was hardly likely; we rarely had anything to say to each other. Her eye went ferociously to my book. "Jane Austen, wouldn't you know. Now that's what I call a provocation. Do you realize," she demanded, "how the servants in those big houses lived? The hours they had to put in, the paltry wages they got? Chicken-feed! And where the money to keep up those mansions came from? From plantations in the Caribbean run on the broken backs of Negro slaves!" It was as if she was leading a meeting.
    "Mr. Knightly doesn't have a plantation," I said.
    "What do you think the British Empire is? The whole thing's a plantation! The whole kit and caboodle!"
    Bertram said quietly, "You should listen to Ninel, Rosie. She's right about that."
    Ninel was angry at Jane Austen not only on account of the British Empire—she was angry at all novels. Novels, like movies, were pretend-shadows; they failed to diagnose the world as it was in reality. "Crutches," she said, "distractions. And meanwhile the moneybags and the corporate dogs eat up the poor." For Ninel, the only invention worse than novels and movies was religion. She hated her given name because it came out of the Bible. She railed against all varieties of worship. "If you want to get the real lowdown on, okay, let's take Christianity," she urged, "try this out. You're a believing Christian of the twentieth century and you're transported by time machine back into ancient Rome. You're walking around the main squares and it's all pretty impressive. Big marble cathedrals with columns. Huge statues all over the place, and folks crowding into the temples, genuflecting and bringing offerings. Plenty of priests and acolytes in fancy dress, the whole society rests on this spectacular stuff. And then you ask what's behind it, what's it all about. You sit down with a couple of these ancient Romans and they start telling you it's Jupiter, the god who lives up in the sky and runs the world. And you think, Jupiter? Jupiter? What's Jupiter? There isn't any Jupiter, it's all imagination, it's all some made-up idea. You know damn well that this sacred Jupiter that everyone's so devoted to, that everyone's dependent on, that everyone praises and carries on about, and writes epics and treatises and holy books about, and mutters prayers to ... you know damn well that their Jupiter is air, their Jupiter is a phantom, there isn't any Jupiter, no Jupiter of any kind, the whole religion's a sham and a fake and a delusion, no matter how many poets and intellectuals adhere to it, no matter how many thrills and epiphanies people get out of it. Then you come back to the twentieth century, and what you've seen and understood doesn't mean a thing, you're blind as a bat, you figure you've got the goods on Jupiter but Jesus is different, Jesus is for real, Jupiter is a vast communal lie but Jesus is a vast transcendent truth...."
    Bertram was standing at the stove, heating up the kettle for tea. He gave a pleasurable little chirp and poured the water into our cups. "Well, now you've heard one of Ninel's flights. You don't run into talk like that every day, it