Vera Returns To Marta City (Ch.11f) : Introduction To Jairis

CHAPTER XI (CONTINUED): VERA RETURNS TO MARTA          

Ch.11f : Introduction To Jairis

 

So Vera went around to Julia’s apartment for a second time later in the week to join the discussions or to listen as she would to a small gathering of her new friends.  She was the first to arrive apparently so Julia gave her a fresh hot drink from the wall and sat her down.  Soon after a man arrived, she could hear his deep voice in the corridor and the warm welcome of Julia before he came into the room.

 

‘This is Jairis, meet Vera!  He’s the leader of our little group. You remember, I told you about him.’

 

‘Yes of course.  Julia mentioned you quite a lot.  Pleased to meet you.’

 

‘I am not really the leader of the group,’ he boomed, casually.  ‘We don’t really have a leader, do we Julia?  I thought we agreed we didn’t need one.’  He spoke loudly, and with very good humour, as if he were used to talking to strangers.  Vera couldn’t remember much of what Julia said about him, but the essence was that he was the “big intellectual” of the group, and therefore the leader.

 

‘It’s good to see more new blood anyway: that’s what we need, more new blood!  We’re all quite “new” actually,’ he joked.  Vera was quite flattered to be the object of this obviously confident and intelligent man’s good humour.  She wasn’t much used to the good humour of men since she had been separated from Luvius.

 

Jairis was a very tall man, over six foot at least and well built.  His frame  was large but he carried no excess fat, she imagined, and she doubted that he had the muscular build of someone who did much manual work, which corresponded with what Julia had said about his work.  Vera couldn’t remember what that was, but he was some kind of lecturer or researcher into some kind of non-scientific subject.  He was unusually unkempt in appearance.  While most modern men of today wore their hair pretty short and very tidy he looked as if he had not had a trim for a long time, nor was it styled in any coherent way.  This man had blondy-brown, wavy, it might be better termed, curled hair which dropped over his forehead and over his ears and well over the collar of his sweater.  From time to time he would brush it away from his eyes with his fingers in an automatic movement.  His face was strong and the eyes sensitive and attentive.  He was obviously younger than Luvius, less tired around the eyes, although certainly a few years older than Vera.  Maybe he was in his mid or late thirties, but he looked young and he seemed to have energy.  He was not quite the same, she thought instantly, as any man that she knew well.

 

Without fuss he sat on Julia’s settee right next to Vera, although there were a number of other seats he could have sat on at a more respectful distance.  Vera felt suddenly crowded, pushed into a sudden intimacy with a stranger she was not ready to deal with all at once.  He seemed nice indeed but she felt surrounded and under scrutiny, where she would have preferred to take a back seat until she felt ready.  She was relieved to see Julia take a seat not far away, opposite.

 

‘So you’ve been in space, I hear?’ he said, jumping immediately into new areas of conversation.  At least this was something she could talk about.

 

‘Yes, until a month ago.  I’m a MIOST engineer.  I was on one of the space stations for a few months.’

 

‘I bet that was interesting.  Julia mentioned a bit about that.  I gather you were forced back to Marta for some infraction of the rules.’

 

‘Yes,’ admitted Vera defensively.  She felt she was being pushed.  She did not wish to reveal everything to this man.  But he seemed to know quite a bit about her.  Probably he was just one of the type who never forget anything they’ve been told.  She chided herself, in the way she often had when studying, for having forgotten some of the details Julia had told her about this man.

 

‘Julia told me those soulless people forced you back down to the ground because you were late for a couple of shifts,’ he said.  Julia heard the man’s opinion of MIOST as if it were the first time she had heard such disrespectful views from a stranger.  They seemed childish views to hold of an important organisation such as MIOST, even though they were also her own.  The responses of the old Vera still lingered in her disillusioned mind.  She could not help but consider him disrespectful and immature in his derision, even though she agreed with him.

 

‘Yes.  It does not take much to earn disapproval at MIOST.  Years of good work and hard toil can be betrayed in less than a handful of incidents.’

 

‘I heard there was a man involved too,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye, as if he thought the story was made much more exciting by the romantic involvement.  She thought him a bit too rude in his intrusion into her personal life.  She had only just met the man and here he was revealing what he already knew about her.

 

‘Yes.  He’s still on the station.’  She was sure Jairis knew that.  He knew everything else.  What had Julia been saying about her?

 

‘They are despicable, aren’t they?  They don’t even care about your personal happiness.  As you said, you’ve worked for them for years and this is how they reward you.’

 

‘It was a shock, I must say,’ said Vera.  ‘But I’m getting over it now.’

 

‘You’re an ideal person to join our group,’ he said.  ‘You’re angry, but you have learned from the experience.  Perhaps it’s made you see that they are not always right.  In fact, that they are very often unfair, in most of their dealings with their workers.’  He was actually quite accurate in his assessment of her.  He was more understanding than she had given him credit for.  Jairis did remind her of Luvius in that he seemed to have some understanding of her and to care about her situation.  He was also more forward and intrusive than Luvius.  This gave the impression of a man who was inwardly and outwardly confident.  Perhaps he enjoyed his job and the status he evidently had in his role in this group.  As she calmed to his questioning and even enjoyed the way he steered the conversation. She relaxed more.

 

To deflect him from asking too many of the details of her demotion to Marta City she asked about him.  He was a lecturer in economics at one of the Universities of the city, a subject which although she had learned the basics in her education, she had not touched for years and could remember little of.  She did not really understand economics any more, and never had understood it well in the past.  Basically as she understood it, economics was a set of theories about the way the labour market operated and how inflation could occur, although there had been little of that in her life.  Nonetheless inflation theories were taught strenuously as a warning about the past.  Economics was also about how governments were best leaving as much of it as possible to the natural evolution of the markets.  She had found the subject drier than many others and it had seemed to contain little relevance for her own life, interests or working potential.

 

She almost regretted encouraging him as he began to talk enthusiastically of his own economic and other opinions.  In his eyes Gallanol had gone too far down the path of degeneracy as represented by the ‘insanity’ of the free market and the corrosion of the liberal morality which predated modernism today, if only those with power could be made to see, offered a good base on which to begin anew and engineer a far better model of society.  He knew just how it should be done.

 

‘That’s interesting,’ she said sceptically.  ‘Which way could Gallanol’s society be heading, do you think, after it gets straightened out?’

 

He sat back in his chair and looked at the far wall. The indifference that had hung in his eyes until then changed to a hint of a gleam.  ‘There’s an opportunity here,’ he replied.  ‘An opportunity to build the society that could’ve existed for centuries – without all the greed and arrogance and stupidity that doesn’t care what it destroys, one based on true equality and values that count.’

 

She looked at him as if he had just said something that she didn’t hear very often, which she hadn’t.  ‘Recently I’ve thought the same thing myself,’ she said.  ‘Is that why you come here?’

 

‘I came here to get way from a world that has been left spiritually devastated by its infatuation with trivia and mindless distractions and overwork.  The banks and the Houses own everybody now, and the qualities that they reward are the ones that suit their needs: loyalty and obedience.  The cattle are content, grazing in the fields.  Nobody wants to think about what it’s doing to them, or where it’s all leading.  They don’t want to think at all.  It’s gone too far now for anything to change easily.  But here in groups like this there is a re-examination of this lunacy.  With the right people of vision in control, it could turn out differently.

 

‘You really think so?’ she said, as if she did not really believe it could be true.

 

‘Why not, people are all humans.  We have tremendous possibilities if only we could be guided in creative directions.

 

‘How would you make it different, if you could?’ she asked.  She found she liked talking on this subject.  He became more enthusiastic.

 

‘What Gallanol needs is for the anarchy of competition and of company bondage to be replaced by freedom from economics; an end to needless an pointless competition; the promotion of the individual’s wider talents; a softening of attitudes to work, and greater encouragement and advice for the individual; aid for those who are lost; checks and balances on those who are greedy and are in a position to abuse their power.’

 

‘Wow, that’s a long list and I’m not sure I understand all of it – but that’s not the way most people in Marta and Gallanol seem to think,’ she pointed out.  ‘They believe in the freedoms the governments have given them.

 

‘And look at the mess they’ve made!  They don’t understand human needs at all.’

 

‘Goods and desirable levels for their consumption should be determined by real human needs and less by exploitative marketing “experts”, and industry limited to the size necessary to provide them – thus reducing the need for wasteful competitive business sectors.  Occupations should be determined or assigned on the basis of society’s need, and of course on the aptitude and preferences of the individuals.’

 

Jairis saw himself as an outcast from the herd, set apart in the company of philosophers and artists, by the sensitivity of seeing too much and too deep.  Everybody was born with the sparks for creativity and understanding dormant within them but its potential was quenched by the modern world’s delusions of objectivity and rationality.  Preoccupation with the external, and the elevation of science as the way to find not only knowledge but also salvation had diverted humanity from the inner paths that mattered.  He particularly disliked the general adulation accorded to the “practical”.

 

Vera, who had been brought up to be very practical and had led her life with practical precision and discipline until recently, was strangely refreshed by his attitude.  It mirrored her “rebellion” from the path expected of her.  Her hope that she might have made some indent on this interesting man was rewarded when Jairis made an attempt to extend their relationship socially.

 

‘Perhaps after work sometime soon we might meet and continue our conversation?’

 

‘Yes, I would like that,’ she dared not to think he was attracted to her in any way beyond the issues which interested the group, but Luvius had wanted her before she had been reposted to Marta.  She began to dare to wonder if maybe she would find love a second time.  It was much to be prized.  She had thought that she still belonged to Luvius, but there was little prospect of seeing him often when he was in space and Vidnet contact was no substitute for the real touch of a boyfriend.  Too easily she was able to reply, ‘When?’

 

‘Tomorrow evening if you are free or is this a little too soon?’  He seemed casual, as if it was not necessarily of great importance if she did not wish to, although she sounded enthusiastic towards the idea.

 

Vera had not been prepared by most of her life for this situation.  Being offered a meeting one to another with a man was something she could not help but feel the significance of, unless it had been to discuss a technical matter related to work.  But her relationship with Luvius had changed all that for the better.  It had given her confidence, and yet when he had been taken away from her and she had been sent back to a lesser job back down in Marta some of that confidence had been removed.  To be asked for a drink and a conversation still engendered great excitement in her.