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people there had it in generous helpings. The earth beneath your bare feet is something you can never feel in a city park.
    Daily life was busy and satisfying. There were chickens and hogs to feed, bees and sheep to care for, fish to harvest, and cows to milk. Everybody worked: men, women, and children. It all seemed to fit together without any apparent effort. Everybody seemed to know what to do when it needed doing. You could think of it as a well-oiled machine, but I never liked that metaphor, especially for people. I thought of it as an organism. Any social group is, but this one worked.
    Most of the other communes I'd visited had glaring flaws. Things would not get done because everyone was too stoned or couldn't be bothered or didn't see the necessity of doing it in the first place. That sort of ignorance leads to typhus and soil erosion and people freezing to death and invasions of social workers who take your children away. I'd seen it happen.
    Not here. They had a good picture of the world as it is, not the rosy misconceptions so many other utopians labor under. They did the jobs that needed doing.
    I could never detail all the nuts and bolts (there's that machine 'metaphor again) of how the place worked. The fish-cycle ponds alone were complicated enough to overawe me. I killed a spider in one of the greenhouses, then found out it had been put there to eat a specific set of plant predators. Same for the frogs. There were insects in the water to kill other insects; it got to a point where I was afraid to swat a mayfly without prior okay.
    As the days went by I was told some of the history of the place. Mistakes had been made, though surprisingly few.
    One had been in the area of defense. They had made no provision. for it at first, not knowing much about the brutality and random violence that reaches even to the out-of-theway corners.
    Guns were the logical and preferred choice out here, but were beyond their capabilities.
    One night a carload of men who had had too much to drink showed up. They had heard of the place in town. They stayed for two days, cutting the phone .lines and raping many of the women.

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    The people discussed all the options after the invasion was over, and settled on the organic one.
    They bought five German shepherds. Not the psychotic wretches that are marketed under the description of "attack dogs," but specially trained ones from a firm recommended by the Albuquerque police. They were trained as both Seeing-Eye and police dogs. They were perfectly harmless until an outsider showed overt aggression, then they were trained, not to disarm, but to go for the throat.
    It worked, like most of their solutions. The second invasion resulted in two dead and three badly injured, all on the other side. As a backup in case of a concerted attack, they hired an ex-marine to teach them the fundamentals of closein dirty fighting. These were not dewy-eyed flower children.
    There were three superb meals a day. And there was leisure time, too. It was not all work.
    There was time to take a friend out and sit in the grass under a tree, usually around sunset, just before the big dinner. There was time for someone to stop working for a few minutes, to share same special treasure. I remember being taken by the hand by one womanwhom I must call Tall-one-with-file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt (13 of 24)
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    file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20Persistence%20Of%20Vision.txt green-eyes-to a spot where mushrooms were growing in the cool crawl space beneath the barn. We wriggled under until our faces were buried in the patch, picked a few, and smelled them. She showed me how to smell. I would have thought a few weeks before that we had ruined their beauty, but after all it was only visual. I was already beginning to discount that sense, which is so removed from the essence of an object. She showed me that they were still beautiful to touch and smell after we had