Streiter got so pissed-off arguing, he gave me a shove.
“One more of those, you ignoramus, and I’ll put you in the infirmary,” I said. It embarrassed me: every time I got in a beef, my voice automatically dropped three octaves. It was my “B” movie villain voice.
The Unit watch-on-duty got between us. A medium-sized apple, neither of us would poke him, he’d crumble like a lunar frog’s dust dream. A big ugly piece of furniture like Streiter, a berserker like me when I got hot.
“Come on, back off, both of you!” He pushed us away from the common center, himself. There was enough leverage. I hit one side of the bubble, Streiter the other. Cramped quarters on the Moon can do it, drive you up the curve of the bubble every time.
“I’m tired of him copping out for every mistake he makes,” Streiter snarled. “And then dreaming up elves and gnomes to take the blame!”
“Don’t blame me for your lack of imagination.”
“Moth! You’re fulla shit, friend!”
“Is Shed number three gone, or isn’t it?”
“Yeah…gone, so what! How’d you screw it up. C’mon, it must have been a helluva sweet move to completely destroy a three ton storage shed…what’s your story?”
“It was a moth.”
Streiter growled and came for me again. The WOD headed him off at the pass between the compUvac and the feeder, and threatened him with the cooler, so he simmered down.
“Now that one takes the prize,” Streiter rolled his eyes. “A moth, a goddam moth, for chrissakes, on the moon!”
“Is the shed gone?” I asked, quietly, rationally.
“Yeah, the shed is gone.”
“It was a moth. It came swooping down, and chewed it up, the entire shed.”
“Oh, Christ, I give up!”
Streiter turned and stumped out of the control bubble. The WOD stared at me a minute. His eyebrows quivered. “Terry,” he said, softly, “report to the medic in twenty minutes. I’ll get a relief for you.”
He left, and I stared out at the lunar surface for a long time. Twenty minutes can be a long time.
It was a moth, dammit!
“They’re the Blinds,” he said, softly.
“They were created out of an experiment with self-regenerating cell tissue. They lie flaccid and dormant, just flaps of flesh, without eyes or sense organs or souls, until a thought passes them by. Then they fasten on it, litterally pull themselves hand-over-hand up that thought…”
The old Indian rope trick, Wyckoff thought picturesquely.
“…until they’ve established a form for themselves. They have only one drive; survival. They’ll do anything to keep living, such life as it may be. They’ll take any form, anything at all—a man, a cockroach, a gull in the sky, anything that has the faintest tinge of thought in it, even a witless thing like a paramecium—and they build from that. But they’ll do anything to stay alive.”
“The Blinds,” repeated Wyckoff.
“Yes, that’s right,” the little fat man nodded.
He was perspiring.
“You dirty little weasel,” Wyckoff said quietly. “It’s both refreshing and discouraging to find out that cowardice hasn’t been bred out in this future you’re from.”
“Why, I—”
“You eat worms! Shut up. Let me think, crud.”
Speechless, we stand before Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” or one of the hell images of Bosch, and we find our senses reeling; vanishing into a daydream mist of what must this man have been like, what must he have suffered? A passage from Dylan Thomas, about birds singing in the eaves of a lunatic asylum, draws us up short, steals the breath from our mouths and the blood and thoughts stand still in the body as we are confronted with the absolute incredible achievement of what he has done. So imperfect, so faulty, so broken the links in communication between humans, that to pass along one corner of a vision we have had to another creature is an accomplishment that fills us with wonder and pride. How staggering is it then, to see, to know what Bosch and Van Gogh and Thomas knew and saw. To live for a microsecond what they lived. To look out of their eyes and view the universe from a new angle. This, then is the temporary, fleeting, transient, incredibly valuable priceless gift from the genius to those of us crawling forward moment after moment in time, with nothing to break our routine but death.
How amazed, how stopped like a broken clock we are, when we are in the presence of the genius. When we see what his incredible talents—wrought out of torment—have created; what magnificence, or depravity, or beauty, perhaps in a spare moment, only half-trying; he has brought it forth for the rest of eternity and the world to treasure.
And how awed we are, when caught surprised in the golden web of true genius—so that finally, for the first time we know that all the rest of it was kitsch; it is made so terribly, crushingly obvious to us, just how mere, how petty, how mud-condemned we are, and that the only grandeur we will ever know is that which we know second hand from our geniuses. That the closest we will come to our “Heaven,” while alive, is through our unfathomable geniuses, however imperfect or bizarre they may be.
And is this, then, why we treat them so shamefully, harm them, drive them inexorably to their personal madhouses, kill them?
Who is it, we wonder, who really still the golden voices of the geniuses, who turn their visions to dust?
Who, the question asks itself, unbidden, are the savages and who the princes?
Fortunately, the night comes quickly, and answers can be avoided till the next time, and till the next marvelous singer of strange songs is stilled in the agonies of his rhapsodies.