Nostalgia Read Free

straight to respond.
    —First, before my reply to your question, my condolences to you, Bill—and to all those who knew Holly and to her family. Holly came to us at WDN for research and she used our camp outside Maskinia as a base. We even fed her, when she returned from one of her assignments, famished. Now to reply to your question, Bill. Well, it goes against our traditional humanitarian values, doesn’t it, letting fellow humans just die? Most of them are innocent men and women who’ve done us no harm, but who’ve come to depend on us. We also have to ask ourselves how the kind of policy you describe desensitizes us in our treatment of the less fortunate among our own population…Bill.
    Bill’s face lit up, he looked around with a grin, priming his audience.
    —Now wait a minute. Am I missing something here, Dwayne? They don’t threaten to
eat
us, do they, our less fortunate, as you call them? It’s different with our own people, surely. We know who they are, we know what their problems are—it’s not out of hand here, is it? They don’t fire rockets at us or smuggle out terrorists. Prem, what do you think? Should we let populations that can’t help themselves and are a threat to the rest of us go their own way—die if they must?
    He sounded increasingly harsh and his face was red. Holly’s fate seemed to have hit him hard. His guest on the other side was Dr Prem Chodhry, a political scientist in India. An older man, he spoke with a slight accent but an assured tone. I could see now that he was not physically on the set but was being relayed from Bangalore.
    —It’s a hard choice, Bill. And I sympathize with your compassionate view, Dwayne. But we have enough problems of our own this side of the Long Border. At some point we have to cut off life support of the hopeless and save on resources. The good that’s in the human race must be preserved—or we all sink.
    To which Dwayne quickly but politely responded:
    —Do you mean to say, Prem, that large numbers of people should simply be cut off like cancers from the body? Are you truly advocating that?
    —Well, Dwayne, pouring supplies into the region hasn’t helped the poor there, has it? You know that. If anythingit’s strengthened the warlords. They live lavishly and buy sophisticated weapons, using the aid given to them…and those same weapons are then used against us on this side of the Border. We’re funding our own affliction.
    Dwayne took umbrage at the insinuation. Emotionally she began,—But we can feed the poor directly, even if—
    But here Bill cut her off.
    —If you please, Dwayne, we’ll come back to this point—which is extremely interesting, by the way—but first let’s see what our viewers think. It’s time for the…Goode Poll!
    A flood of responses rushed in, thousands of faces streaming into the YES and NO boxes that had appeared, the corresponding babble of voices reached a screaming crescendo, which was filtered into a single, trained male voice that cheerfully expressed the impassioned consensus: Let them die!
    The poll result: 91.5 percent in favour. Let them die.
    And then we were back in the midst of frightened, frightening people, desperate hungry people, and armed well-fed men with gleaming, buffed torsos, all gawking at cheerfully naïve Holly Chu, an athletic young woman dressed by Safari Apparel, loping along the street with her equipment, pausing to speak to the mike on her collar, waving here and there familiarly, pausing to chat with a mother, tickling a toddler, until she is suddenly snatched and swallowed up by a flash of darkness. That quick scream. Then the horror vanishes, perhaps you’ve dreamed it. You’re back in the real, climate-controlled room, your needs at your disposal. The Roboserve skates in with your scotch. There’s something to be saidfor limiting such traumatic exposures, X-rated news that’s diversion, entertainment, and voyeurism combined. That abduction scene will become part of a