#816 Speech Sounds- Octavia Butler
The world has been stricken with a man-made virus, a disease that acts like a stroke on the mind and body. “The illness had played with them, taking away, she suspected, what each valued most.”
So now the world that is left is without speech. In a post disaster L.A., Rye is trying to catch a bus twenty miles to Pasadena. Transportation doesn’t come by that often and can be very dangerous. As she expected, on the bus a violent fight broke out. Because of the disease it was hard to communicate or understand what this argument was about.
“She had heard so little coherent human speech for the past three years, she was no longer certain how well she recognized it, no longer certain of the degree of her own impairment.”
“Loss of verbal language had spawned a whole new set of obscene gestures.” Of course!
The bus empties out with Rye afraid of a gunfight. Along comes a former cop still fulfilling his duty. He takes Rye with him and she allows for a rare relaxing of her defenses. They connect, but her bliss is short-lived as they come upon more trouble and he is killed. In the end, at the moment of her greatest despair, she finds hope in the future.
There is definitely more than a little Mad Max in here. In the afterward, Butler writes: “I began the story feeling little hope of liking for the human species, but by the time I reached the end of it, my hope had come back.”
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