Persistence of Vision Read Free Page A

was embarrassed. -
    Not from the examination; because I had been foolish. The=
    Indian had said they were all deaf and blind but I guess I hadn't quite believed him. -
    He was flooded with relief when I managed to convey to-.= him that I was all right. With eloquent gestures he made me; understand that I was not to stay on the road. He indicated that I should climb over the fence and continue through the: fields. He repeated himself several times to be sure I understood, then held on to me as I climbed over to assure himself that I was out of the way. He reached over the fence ands held my shoulders, smiling at me. He pointed to the road and shook his head, then pointed to the buildings and nodded. He touched my head and smiled when I
    nodded. He climbed back onto the engine and started up, all the time nodding and pointing where he wanted me to go. Then he was off again.
    I debated what to do. Most of me said to turn around, go back to the wall by way of the pasture and head back into the hills. These people probably wouldn't want me aroand. I doubted that I'd be able to talk to them, and they might even resent me. On the other hand, I was fascinated, as who wouldn't be? I wanted to see how they managed it. I still didn't believe that they were all deaf and blind. It didn't seem possible.
    The Sheltie was sniffing at my pants. I looked down at her and she backed away, then daintily approached me as I held out my open hand. She sniffed, then licked me. I patted her on the head, and she hustled back to her sheep.
    I turned toward the buildings.
    The first order of business was money.
    None of the students knew much about it from experience, but the library was full of Braille books. They started reading.
    One of the first things that became apparent was that when money was mentioned, lawyers were not far away. The students wrote letters. From the replies, they selected a lawyer and retained him.
    They were in a school in Pennsylvania at the time. The original pupils of the special schools, five hundred in number, had been narrowed down to about seventy as people left to live with relatives or found other solutions to their special problems. Of those seventy, some had places to go but didn't want to go there; others had few alternatives. Their parents were either dead or not interested in living with them. So the seventy had been gathered from the schools around the country into this one, while ways to deal with them were worked out. The authorities had plans, but the students beat them to it.

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    Each of them had been entitled to a guaranteed annual income since 1980. They had been under the care of the government, so they had not received it. They sent their lawyer to court. He came back with a ruling that they could not collect. They appealed, and won. The money was paid retroactively, with interest, and came to a healthy sum. They thanked their lawyer and retained a real estate agent. Meanwhile, they read.
    They read about communes in New Mexico, and instruct-. ed their agent to look for something out there. He made a_ deal for a tract to be leased in perpetuity from the Navaho..
    nation. They read about the land, found that it would need a lot of water to be productive in the way they wanted it to be.
    They divided into groups to research what they would need to be self-sufficient.
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    file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt Water could be obtained by tapping into the canals that carried it from the reservoirs on the Rio Grande into the. reclaimed land in the south. Federal money was available for the project through a labyrinthine scheme involving HEW, the Agriculture Department, and the Bureau of Indian
    Affairs. They ended up paying little for their pipeline.
    The land was arid. It would need fertilizer to be of use inraising sheep without resorting to open range techniques.: The cost of