Equilateral by Ken Kalfus

Author:Ken Kalfus
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

The Arab needs to be beaten. He demands to be flogged. He hungers for the cudgel and the whip, and a kick or a slap from his betters. He considers every blow a sign of respect, or even love, evidence that he has been judged worthy of discipline and instruction. Strike, strike, strike—and pray to wake him from his millennia-long torpor.

Yet except in difficult cases Ballard has forbidden the bastinado, the Spanish-imported flogging that breaks the small bones and tendons of a man’s feet and often leaves him crippled for life. A cripple incurs dishonor. He begs at the mosque and the market, sprawled in the dirt to be sniffed at by dogs. He can’t marry—but he can’t excavate more sand either. Depending on circumstance, exquisitely balancing Christian leniency against the demands of their undertaking, Ballard has formulated other means of compulsion. The Arabs appreciate this, he says.

Miss Keaton notes that most of the fellahin bear with perverse pride distinctive marks or raised calluses on their foreheads that have emerged over a lifetime of bowing and scraping against their prayer mats. The prayer bumps usually assume irregular shapes, but she occasionally encounters a man with a knob so perfectly round and evenly raised from his head that she has to resist the urge to pull on its stalk. She has discovered bumps that are circular disks and bumps that form ovals for which the two foci can be computed. Some prayer bumps are small, some are grand dominating features that take up most of the region between eyebrows and scalp. Often these calluses bleed, scab, and fall off, leaving peculiar depressions on the foreheads, difficult to distinguish from the effects of cancer or venereal disease. She once met a man, employed in a ware house at Point B where the spades are kept, whose forehead accurately mapped Trivium Charontis, the intriguing oasis slightly north of the Martian equator.

These prayer bumps are acquired characteristics, to be sure, not in the blood, not heritable. Yet nearly every Egyptian boy is destined to bow and scrape and be so disfigured. Every race of man is defined by qualities incurred through experience as well as attributes transmitted at birth; its virtues and faults are mutable across the centuries. A productive race’s industry and respect for legitimate authority can be engendered no less than its good dentition.

Now she contemplates the canal builders of Mars, who have already dug broad waterways thousands of miles long and are extending them at great dispatch, under Earth’s straining, watchful, ever-astonished eye. They’ve invented ingenious, powerful machinery for the task. They’ve given their machines noble purpose. They’ve comprehended their world’s tenuous atmosphere, dwindling bodies of water, hardy flora, exotic fauna, and embattled intelligence as interrelated elements of a single imperiled environment. Mars evidently commands much better laborers as well: more disciplined than their terrestrial analogues, more committed to their planet’s survival.

Yet the engineers of Mars and their laborers are no more than victors in a brutal rivalry to survive their environment, just as the men of Earth are.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.