In 2014, I returned to America. I flew into Boston to graduate from Northeastern, cum laude, and step foot onto my putative alma mater for the first time. Hanging around in Cambridge the day before, I stopped by an honest-to-God newsstand and picked up next month’s issue of Asimov’s, feeling extremely Benny Russell as I did so.
In a nearby café whose name I long forgot, I opened it up and began to read.
I’ve thought of this story ever since. Through the end of Obama, the madness of 2016, the Trump presidency, hanging beef, selling cell phones, working tech support, through COVID, layoffs, and the coming of Lyra, I’ve thought of this story. It strikes me at odd moments, and I shiver a little.
The prose is workmanlike, but so was Asimov’s. But the idea…
Michael works in wood, in the village where Jim throws pots and Sarah dispenses medicines and Ann weaves cloth. And his is the first cabin, closest to the shore, when the woman from the ocean comes. She helps herself in, warms herself by the fire, and when she can be civilized again after her trials, she introduces herself as Kali. Her bright clothes and strange accent mark her a stranger, but everyone in the village is helpful and hopeful to anyone they meet in the flesh.
Kali’s ship had crashed, and she, ultimately, the only survivor. She and her people had left a world of war, on the brink of self-destruction, and she has found herself in a new world where the people barter for what they need, where they learn from master to apprentice, where no one has ever heard of writing.
And no one has heard of war.
“Wars…” Susan repeated, mouthing the word in a way that suggested it was a sound with no meaning.
“People killing people, in large numbers.”
Furrows deepened in Susan’s face. “People? Which people? Killing…which people?”
“That’s a very good question, Susan.” Kali lay back down on her side, pulling the blankets up and closing her eyes.
Kali follows the script everyone suggests to her, goes to apprentice to Michael, gets romanced by Michael. Michael plays her some of his songs on a homemade zither, the folk songs handed down from one voice to another and some of his own compositions. She asks about written music, but he doesn’t understand the concept.
“I do share my music with everyone,” Michael said. “I teach my songs to anyone who asks.”
“But what about other people? What about people you might never meet, people far away, people in the future, after you’re gone? If you wrote your music down, it could last forever. Isn’t that a lovely thought?”
Michael frowned, as if struggling to understand. “But … who are these people? Why would they want to know my songs?”
An edge came to Kali’s voice. “Some people would want to. Not everyone, but some people would see them and love them. Can you see the beauty of that idea?”
Michael started to speak, stopped, started again. “It seems … strange. Why would I give something to someone I don’t know, someone I’ve never even met? Someone who has never asked me for the thing I’m giving? If I could see this person, if he told me he wanted to learn my songs, then I would understand …” His voice faded.
After muttering some Shakespeare, Kali theorizes what may have happened. A virus (Michael mouths ‘vi-rus?’, another unknown to him), probably man-made, released into the air, changing the DNA and cerebral expression of all the newborn babies. Affecting the expression of social behavior – how we think of social behavior. Michael, and Susan and Jim and Ann and everyone in this brave new world, are unable to think of social structures in the abstract – unable to identify with nation, with distant ancestors, even with “the village” as a thing unto itself, separate from other villages. They only identify with the people in front of them.
Some distant spark eliminated ‘them’ from our consciousness…along with ‘us.’ Oxytocin, after all, is the hormone of family love, and also tribalistic hatred. Kali bitterly calls it “probably the least invasive thing, the smallest possible change you could make to human nature and still make war impossible.” As she puts it: “People are as intelligent, as aggressive, as passionate as they ever were, but they won’t make war.”
It’s Michael’s incomprehension, Kali’s bitterness, that always comes back to me. This notion of a pacifist people without flags, without place names, without memory and without future, the generations turning over in stagnancy, that haunts me. Surely, someone thought this was a utopia. Surely enough, some people IRL absolutely do. I’d like to see what they make of this little village where the woman from the ocean came to live.
Michael points out that things do change, even without things like war and scholarship and literature and history. Kali came from the ocean. That changed his life. Michael is right.
Kali follows the script, marries Michael, bears him a daughter, Asha. Asha is a bright and beautiful child, beloved of the village…but as Kali tries to teach her letters, she proves Michael’s child. The virus is still in the air, Kali herself is “the last of an extinct species, a species that failed and died out long ago.” She wonders what the hell she was thinking – what difference could one child make? Or a dozen? And to what end? To bring back the world set to annihilate itself? To bring back war?
Kali walks back out into the ocean, in her tattered but still-bright ship’s uniform, and does not come back.
Michael did not marry again. He was devoted to his daughter and lavished all his love and attention on her. As she grew older she would sometimes speak about people in the world outside the village in strange ways, almost as if they were people that she knew. Her father only smiled at this, and didn’t criticize her for her odd ideas.
It’s long past Nebulas season for this little story from 2014. Then, and now, I don’t think it would appeal to enough folks to garner a Hugo. But it’s collected a very select prize indeed – it rattles around in the back of my head, years later, so much so I specifically sought out and bought another copy of Asimov’s just to read it again.
I think of this story every time someone describes a utopia, and in my business, I hear a lot of utopias. Would this utopia be capable of war? Of scholarship? Of memory? Of descent? Or would they be pleasant, bland nothings, generation on generation, like the village by the ocean that Kali found? Would a Kali fallen into this utopia, or that one, or mine, find a place for herself? Or would she have to march back out into the ocean again?
What Bunker describes is no less than the death of the social sciences I had spent four years studying in China when I picked up that newsstand copy in Boston. And it was a dark world, unlit by science and unhallowed by history, and it is a world that many people fervently wish to plunge us into. One small change, and we are placid tribes again.
It’s enough to make you want to take a long walk off the shore.
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