“Then why did you come?” I asked her.
Her rage came out into the open again. She said this to me with all possible nastiness: “Because money talks, ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy.’ “
We were further shocked when we learned that she meant to administer tests to us separately. We said innocently that we would get many more correct answers if we were allowed to put our heads together.
She became a tower of irony. “Why, of course, Master and Mistress,” she said. “And wouldn’t you like to have an encyclopaedia in the room with you, too, and maybe the faculty of Harvard University, to tell you the answers, in case you’re not sure?”
“That would be nice,” we said.
“In case nobody has told you,” she said, “this is the United States of America, where nobody has a right to rely on anybody else – where everybody learns to make his or her own way.
“I’m here to test you,” she said, “but there’s a basic rule for life I’d like to teach you, too, and you’ll thank me for it in years to come.”
This was the lesson: “Paddle your own canoe,” she said. “Can you say that and remember it?”
Not only could I say it, but I remember it to this day: “Paddle your own canoe.”
Hi ho.
So we paddled our own canoes. We were tested as individuals at the stainless steel table in the tile-lined diningroom. When one of us was in there with Dr. Cordiner, with “Aunt Cordelia,” as we came to call her in private, the other one was taken as for away as possible – to the ballroom at the top of the tower at the north end of the mansion.
Withers Witherspoon had the job of watching whichever one of us was in the ballroom. He was chosen for the job because he had been a soldier at one time. We heard “Aunt Cordelia’s” instructions to him. She asked him to be alert to clues that Eliza and I were communicating telepathically.
Western science, with a few clues from the Chinese, had at last acknowledged that some people could communicate with certain others without visible or audible signals. The transmitters and receivers for such spooky messages were on the surfaces of sinus cavities, and those cavities had to be healthy and clear of obstructions.
The chief clue which the Chinese gave the West was this puzzling sentence, delivered in English, which took years to decipher: “I feel so lonesome when I get hay fever or a cold.”
Hi ho.
Well, mental telepathy was useless to Eliza and me over distances greater than three meters. With one K of us in the diningroom, and the other in the ballroom, our bodies might as well have been on different planets – which is in fact their condition today.
Oh, sure – and I could take written examinations, but Eliza could not. When “Aunt Cordelia” tested Eliza, she had to read each question out loud to her, and then write down her answer.
And it seemed to us that we missed absolutely every question. But we must have answered a few correctly, for Dr. Cordiner reported to our parents that our intelligence was ” … low normal for their age.”
She said further, not knowing that we were eavesdropping, that Eliza would probably never learn to read or write, and hence could never be a voter or hold a driver’s license. She tried to soften this some by observing that Eliza was ” … quite an amusing chatterbox.”
She said that I was ” … a good boy, a serious boy – easily distracted by his scatter-brained sister. He reads and writes, but has a poor comprehension of the meanings of words and sentences. If he were separated from his sister, there is every reason to believe that he could become a fillingstation attendant or a janitor in a village school. His prospects for a happy and useful life in a rural area are fair to good.”
The People’s Republic of China was at that very moment secretly creating literally millions upon millions of geniuses – by teaching pairs or small groups of congenial, telepathically compatible specialists to think as single minds. And those patchwork minds were the equals of Sir Isaac Newton’s or William Shakespeare’s, say.
Oh, yes – and long before I became President of the United States of America, the Chinese had begun to combine those synthetic minds into intellects so flabbergasting that the Universe itself seemed to be saying to them, “I await your instructions. You can be anything you want to be. I will be anything you want me to be.”
Hi ho.
I learned about this Chinese scheme long after Eliza died, and long after I lost all my authority as President of the United States of America. There was nothing I could do with such knowledge by then.
One thing amused me, though: I was told that poor old Western Civilization had provided the Chinese the inspiration to put together such synthetic geniuses. The Chinese got the idea from the American and European scientists who put their heads together during the Second World War, with the single-minded intention of creating an, atomic bomb.
Hi ho.
Chapter 17
OUR poor parents had first believed that we
were idiots. They had tried to adapt to that. Then they believed that we were geniuses. They had tried to adapt to that. Now they were told that we were dull normals, and they were trying to adapt to that.
As Eliza and I watched through peepholes, they made a pitiful and fog-bound plea for help. They asked Dr. Cordelia Swain Cordiner how they were to harmonize our dullness with the fact that we could converse so learnedly on so many subjects in so many languages.
Dr. Cordiner was razor-keen to enlighten them on just this point “The world is full of people who are very clever at seeming much smarter than they really are,” she said. “They dazzle us with facts and quotations and foreign words and so on, whereas the truth is that they know almost nothing of use in life as it is really lived. My purpose is to detect such people – so that society can be protected from them, and so they can be protected from themselves.
“Your Eliza is a perfect example,” she went on. “She has lectured to me on economics and astronomy and music and every other subject you can think of, and yet she can neither read nor write, nor will she ever be able to.”
She said that our case was not a sad one, since there were no big jobs we wished to hold. “They have almost no ambition at all,” she said, “so life can’t disappoint them. They want only that life as they have known it should go on forever, which is impossible, of course.”
Father nodded sadly. “And the boy is the smarter of the two?”
“To the extent he can read and write,” said Dr. Cordiner. “He isn’t nearly as socially outgoing as his sister. When he is away from her, he becomes as silent as a tomb.
“I suggest that he be sent to some special school, which won’t be too demanding academically or too threatening socially, where he can learn to paddle his own canoe.”
“Do what?” said Father.
Dr. Cordiner told him again. “Paddle his own canoe,” she said.
Eliza and I should have lacked our way through the wall at that point – should have entered the library ragingly, in an explosion of plaster and laths.
But we had sense enough to know that our power to eavesdrop at will was one of the few advantages we had. So we stole back to our bedrooms, and then burst into the corridor, and came running down the front stairs and across the foyer and into the library, doing something we had never done before. We were sobbing.
We announced that, if anybody tried to part us, we would kill ourselves.
Dr. Cordiner laughed at this. She told our parents that several of the questions in her tests were designed to detect suicidal tendencies. “I absolutely guarantee you,” she said, “that the last thing either one of these two would do would be to commit suicide.”
Her saying this so jovially was a tactical mistake on her part, for it caused something in Mother to snap. The atmosphere in the room became electrified as Mother stopped being a weak and polite and credulous doll.
Mother did not say anything at first. But she had clearly become subhuman in the finest sense. She was a coiled female panther, suddenly willing to tear the throats out of any number of childrearing experts – in defense of her young.
It was the one and only time that she would ever be irrationally committed to being the mother of and me.
Eliza and I sensed this sudden jungle alliance telepathically, I think. At any rate, I remember that the damp velvet linings of my sinus cavities were tingling with encouragement.