A Reasonable World

2

In her kindergarten classroom on the Main Deck, Andrea Ottenburg said, “Story time! Let’s make a big circle.” She waited for the scraping of red and blue chairs to stop. When the children were quiet and attentive, she began, “Once there was a marvelous big boat that thousands of people could live on and float around and around the Pacific Ocean. The boat could float on top of the water or underneath it. And do you know what the boat was called?”

“CV!” a dozen voices chorused.

“Yes! And we’re all on that marvelous boat right now. But something funny happened on CV a few years ago. This was before any of you were here. An invisible fairy got on board the boat, and it could get into people’s minds and make them think differently. And people were frightened at first because when the fairy left them to go to somebody else, the people fell into a deep sleep.”

“Like Snow White,” said Linda.

“Exactly! But they woke up again after about a week, and so people weren’t so frightened anymore. But they still didn’t know if it was a good fairy or a bad fairy, so they fooled it with a goat dressed up in a person’s clothes. And the fairy went into the goat, and then do you know what?”

Peter’s hand was raised. “They put it in a box.”

“Yes, and what did they do with the box?”

Three hands were up. “Yes, Sylvia?”

“They sunk it in the ocean.”

“Yes, they sank it in the ocean. But that wasn’t the last of the fairies, was it?”

Heads were shaking.

“No, because when the next baby was bom, another fairy was born with it. And then other babies were bom and other fairies.”

Linda’s hand was up. “Does everybody have a fairy?”

“No, there aren’t that many fairies.”

Another hand. “Mrs. Ottenburg, are they good fairies or bad fairies?”

“Well, we don’t know that yet for sure. That’s why we’re all here on CV, because we want to find out.”

There was a little silence. Then Peter, the bravest, said, “If they’re good fairies, why do they want to kill them?”

“They don’t want to kill them, just put them to sleep.” Oh. She saw the look of comprehension in their faces. They were buying it, for now: but all this hypocrisy would have to be undone later—at what cost?

Andrea Ottenburg, who liked to speak her mind even though she was a detainee, expressed her concerns to Melanie Kurtz, the chief of kindergarten and preschool education. Kurtz agreed with her and brought the matter up at a conference later that week.

“What Andrea and some of the other teachers are concerned about,” said Kurtz, “is that this program runs counter to our commitment to teach children as early as possible to distinguish fantasy from reality. There are some things we have to shield them from, of course, but it really is disturbing that we’re introducing imaginary entities, which we’re going to have to tell them later don’t exist. Pedagogically this is a very counterproductive thing, and I just wonder if we’ve looked hard enough for another solution.”

“It really isn’t possible to discuss the parasite realistically, at that age, though, is it?” Harriet Owen asked. “What do you think, Dwayne?”

“No, of course we can’t do that, and it is necessary to tell them something that will tend to quiet their anxieties,” Dwayne Swarts said. “Fortunately or unfortunately, they all know what fairies are, and so that seems like the obvious way to go about it.”

“I don’t agree,” Dorothy Italiano said. "I don’t think fantasy is bad for children.”

Kurtz turned to her. “Do you want to teach them to believe in Santa Claus?”

“Not especially, but I think I really understand why parents want to deceive their children in that way, and other ways. They sense that fantasy is important; they want the children to have the feeling that there are wonderful things in the world. Maybe they have to stop believing in fairies later, although there are places in the world where grown people still do, but at least they’ll have had that sense of wonder, of magic.”

“I can’t agree with that. I think children should be taught the truth.”

“Even if it makes them cry themselves to sleep?”

Kurtz said nothing. The conference came to no conclusion, and the kindergarten teachers went on telling their children about fairies.

In the R&D section on “K” Deck, Rick Adams, a new assistant, was getting an orientation lecture from his boss. Adams was skimpy and dark, Glen Cunningham tall and blond. Both of them wore white lab coats, but Adams had more pens in his pocket.

“Let’s look at what we know about the parasite,” Glen Cunningham said. “One, it can’t pass through a solid object. We know that by experiment and inference—the original parasite came out of a capsule that was found at the bottom of the ocean, and apparently had been there for a long time, but it came out only when the capsule was broken.

“So that brings us to the second point. The parasite can’t leave an unconscious person. The fact that totally blind people seem to be immune to McNulty’s suggests a reason why—the parasite has to have some sensory input from its host about the location of another possible host. When the host’s eyes are closed, well, it can’t get that information. We have one trial in which it appears that the parasite can use other sensory information such as touch—the parasite apparently didn’t pass through the space between the two hosts, but they were touching at the time, and we think it may have moved along the nerves of one host until it reached the other. Normally, though, we think the parasite is resident in the brain. In every other trial it has come out of the host’s skull and entered the same way.”

“What about the solid object rule there?” Adams asked.

“The skull isn’t a totally closed object. There’s a direct route to the brain through the nasal passages, for instance. Anyway, number three, we know the parasite reproduces in human females, apparently at the time of conception, and we know by experiment that it can also reproduce in laboratory animals. Experiments with fish are inconclusive so far, but there is some reason to believe that the parasite needs a host with a fairly complex nervous system—it couldn’t invade a plant, for instance, and probably not an insect or arachnid.

“Fourth, we know the parasite can’t travel more than about four feet between hosts. That might be a limitation of time instead of distance, we don’t know yet, but the fact is well established.

“So these are the limitations we know the parasite has, and it’s our job to exploit them in any way we can. And if we can find any others, we’ll hit them too. Sound interesting?”

“Sure does. One question?”

“Okay.”

“It sounds like the parasite is ahead so far. What happens if we don’t catch up?”

“Oh, little things like the end of Western civilization.”