I woke up this morning thinking of Paul Dirac, the Cher-loving physics genius. That’s a strange thing to think about, even for me.
Dirac was a singularly focused man. I had already decided to go on a Twitter-fast for Lent…Perhaps the universe is telling me something?
The following is a selection from A Daughter Of Her People which takes place during Lent, in the year 2167. Both characters learn the lesson of restraint.
Every night Hannah worked on her calendar past midnight, the attic illuminated by the blue glow of the flat screen.
She had to concentrate to work out the date of Rising Sunday. There were two methods to calculate it, and the preferred way confused her: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. It sounded simple, but it didn’t always work out and vexing exceptions occurred. When the full moon fell right on the equinox, it was the second Sunday, and if the first full moon was late, it didn’t apply. In frustration, she almost wished that Max was in the attic to help keep count. . . No! She would ask him for help when hell froze over, which it nearly did two weeks ago. She did not ask then and would not ask now. She would figure out the dates herself.
Rising Sunday was the most important day of the calendar. This year would be a tricky one: the full moon fell on the equinox, so she resorted to the second, easier way that her mother had taught her from the lunar calendars that the village women used for their special holidays. Just count fourteen days from the first full moon after the spring equinox and look for the Sunday after that.
And there it was, April 5, Rising Sunday 2167, easy as pie! The week before, March 29, Palm Sunday. She filled in the dates on the calendar’s square boxes and colored them a rosy pink, the color of today’s lipstick.
Now count back forty-six days for Ash Wednesday and nail down Lent.
She was up to forty-three when Max waddled in and plopped down on the couch. She didn’t look up from her counting; she just knew that he had collapsed onto the couch like a wet fish. That meant he was either drunk or had puffed on one of those pellets that looked like chipmunk scat.
Forty-four, forty-five, forty-six. February 18 was Ash Wednesday. Next week! They needed evergreen ash and there were no evergreens in this place. They would have to make do with hedgewood ash.
And— Ash Wednesday was the beginning of Lent!
The house was so full of delicious food now, courtesy of Sister Jacoba’s latest shipment, and so warm, because of the batteries, and Max had fixed up the well generator, so they had hot running water in the house.
Why couldn’t they have run out of good food in time for Lent? Why couldn’t they have had nice things during the freeze and given them up now? Damn Lent!
Rules were rules. But discarding good food was a sin. As was gluttony. Stuffing themselves with rich foods only to observe Lent would be wrong.
What a can of worms!
The Almighty would just have to understand that they could not endure another ordeal so quickly after the last one, and that committing one sin to avoid another was absurd. She would preside over a lenient Lent, requesting everyone sacrifice to the best of their abilities.
Not the way they did it in Faneesha, everyone trying to out-holy everyone else. Especially the women. Forty days of insufferable female martyrdom with every Faneesha woman trying to outdo the other. This Lent would focus on inner matters. They deserved to eat, if done in moderation.
“May I look at that?” Max asked politely.
Hannah handed over the calendar.
“Good job,” he said.
Hannah exhaled.
Max handed the calendar back to Hannah. “Yesterday was what you might call my birthday,” he said.
“Why didn’t you or Jed tell us?”
“Because I didn’t.”
“I’ll make something good tomorrow. Better late than never—”
“Don’t bother.”
“But I will. We have lots of ingredients.” She was already planning. It would be the masterpiece the Twelfth Night cake had not been.
The flat screen thrummed and writhed with a droning song about peace and love and brotherhood. A mass of young people with long, uncombed hair, dressed in rags, danced on an open, muddy field.
Max snickered. “That’s a song for a candyass.”
“What are they doing?” Hannah was past befuddled. She could only focus on the young womens’ hair. Mama would have had a fit at all that hair: flowing, bushy, curly, long, straight— untamed hair was scandalous!
“Beats me. Jed’s the expert on this stuff. Peace and love and brotherhood.” He spat, “Candyass!”
Max closed his eyes, laid back, and let the droning, vibrating music play with his senses. It was soothing, like a pellet without the bad side effects.
He had begun to enjoy the flat screen drivel. He liked the corny jokes and modestly good storytelling of “Good Guys At Sunrise” from the start, but the wise cracks and cartoon violence of the action movies annoyed him. The ones about the military were preposterous. He had watched a few with Gibbs, who became outraged at the rank insubordination. Max had to caution him, “Gibbsy, they weren’t real.” Now? Even those stupid movies had become a mindless, enjoyable pastime. Like a pellet.
And he had come to enjoy the ballets. Of all things. He could do without the men in tights, but the fleet, slender girls with shining hair were a curiously soothing balm. Perhaps another ballet video would come on after this...
The girl’s shiny purple and green scarf flowed around her shoulders.
“Stop it,” said Hannah. “I’m working on something holy.” Max opened his eyes. He hadn’t realized he was giggling like a girl and singing along to a video. The girl was giggling, too.
“Shhhh,” said Max. “Don’t shout. People are sleeping. What kind of name is Rivka?” Max sprang up, shook, and crashed back onto the couch, arms spread wide.
“How do you know the name Rivka? Did Mr. Jed tell you?”
“He gave me something to read and it’s in there. And Shlomo. What in the Zones kind of names are Shlomo and Rivka?”
Hannah had already told them so much about her village’s history it seemed pointless not to answer. She set down her rose-pink pencil and said, “It’s a long story and I don’t understand all of it, but my grandpa Rosenkrieg changed his name from Sasha to Shlomo, and then to Stephen. And Rivka was my fifth great grandma. Or sixth. I get the generations mixed up. I think Rivka is the same name as Rebecca but I’m not sure of that. When I go home, I’ll get it all cleared up.”
The song droned on: Peace, love, brotherhood. Brotherhood, love, peace.
“How nice,” said Max. He rose from the couch and staggered into the center of the attic. He tried to dance but could only manage an awkward jig and tottered back to the couch. Gasping, he collapsed to one side.
“Less play it again,” he slurred, reaching for the remote. In the darkness and his state of drunken giddiness— just before coming upstairs he’d had fun popping the lock in the antique curio cabinet and helped himself to a bottle of Glenlivet— he couldn’t find it.
The screen blared, “We continue Great Songs of the 1960s with ‘Mr. Tambourine Man.’” The announcer’s exaggerated, careful enunciation, as if speaking over a mouthful of marbles to deaf children, was unmistakably from the Before. It struck Max that settlers often spoke in that flowery way with their voices going up and down and all around, not like Standard Council-Speak— stripped down and tight-lipped:
Yessir, nossir, getrightoitsir.
Sharp minds, dull hearts.
A shatteringly nasal tenor voice accompanied by a jangling acoustic guitar burst out of the flat screen. It took a few seconds for them to recognize the song. They exchanged a glance of delighted amazement.
“It’s the song from the car!” Hannah exclaimed. “I guess different people sang the same songs, like different churches sing the same hymns.”
“Yeah,” said Max. “Not sure what to think of this version.”
“Can I try some of your stuff?” Hannah asked. She moved closer.
For a few seconds, Max looked at Hannah as a man saw a target through a rifle scope. In those few seconds, the thick accretion of sermons and prohibitions against the horrors of the female body were swept away. Women: they had vaginas, which were disgusting, and twisted labyrinthine minds, which were incapable of logical thought, and which ensnared anyone who tried to understand or reason with them. They were good for one thing, making sons. And if rumors were true, even that would be obsolete in due course.
The object in the rifle scope was a girl. She was as shimmeringly perfect as a morning dewdrop on a leaf, splitting the light of summer daybreak into a thousand colors. He reached out his hand to trace the velvet line of a thick dark blonde eyebrow—
And stopped.
Jed would kill him. His hand dropped. He moved a centimeter away.
But why not give her a couple of puffs, one to teach her how to inhale and the next to give her a taste? Didn’t Jed preach about “containment”? Let him stew in his own dogma! Max hadn’t smoked in weeks; he carried his last pellet with him out of habit.
This would be his last time. Her first and his last. He would throw the rest of it away tonight.
Max took the pipe from his thigh pocket and put in a pellet, and someone said—
No.
It was Max. He said it.
No.
Now and forever. If he didn’t say “No” now, there would never be a last time. There would always be a next time.
Max shredded the pellet between his fingers and let the bits fall on the worn carpet.
“No,” he repeated. He still had the stash of legal packets from the Council laboratories. He would give them to Sister Jacoba. She could use them in the convent infirmary. “I’m checking myself out of that hospital, Missie. And I suggest you don’t check in, ever.”
He ground the pellet bits under a boot heel.
A mechanical voice from the flat screen warned it was turning off in ten seconds.
“Talitha was the most beautiful woman in the village,” said Hannah. “Talitha?” “My oldest sister. She disappeared like me.”
“That’s terrible. Maybe when we go back we should go looking for her. That’ll give Jed and me another thing to do. What’d she look like?”
“She was tall and quiet.”
“Like you, eh?”
“No, not like me.”
Max jumped up. “I’m going for a run,” he said, and bolted through the the attic door.
Hannah sprang after him, scattering the pencils on the floor behind her.
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