IF ALL MEN WERE BROTHERS,

WOULD YOU LET ONE MARRY YOUR SISTER?

 

 

 

Introduction to

 

IF ALL MEN WERE BROTHERS,

WOULD YOU LET ONE MARRY YOUR SISTER?:

 

 

This will be the shortest introduction in the book. Because, of all the writers in this anthology, the one who truly needs no introduction is Theodore Sturgeon? Well, there’s that, certainly. Because nothing anyone could say would prepare the reader for what is to follow, the first Sturgeon story in over three years? It’s a valid point. Because each Sturgeon story is a long-awaited experience, no two alike, so why bother gilding the caviar? Okay, I’ll accept that.

 

But none of them happens to be the reason why I am unable to write as beefy an introduction as the others in this book. The reason is simply that Sturgeon saved my life recently. Literally.

 

In February of 1966 I committed one of those incredible life-blunders that defy explanation or analysis. I entered into a marriage with a woman ... a person ... a something whose mind was as alien to me as the mind of a Martian might be. The union was a disaster, a forty-five-day nightmare that left me closer to the edge of the cliff than I had ever been. At the precise moment I thought surely I couldn’t retain my grip on the handle of—everything, I received a letter from Ted Sturgeon. It was part of the interchange of letters that resulted in obtaining this story for the anthology, but it was concerned entirely with what was happening to me. It pulled together the sprung wires of my life. It was one of those pieces of honest concern that (if lucky) everyone will clutch onto at a terrible time of helplessness and desperation. It demonstrates the most obvious characteristic of Sturgeon’s work—love. (We once talked about that. It became clear to Sturgeon and myself that I knew virtually nothing about love but was totally familiar with hate, while Ted knew almost nothing about hate, yet was completely conversant with love in almost all its manifestations.) I would like, with Ted’s permission, to quote from that letter. It will say infinitely more about his work and what motivates him than anything I could attempt. From here down, Sturgeon speaking:

 

“Dear Harlan: For two days I have not been able to get my mind off your predicament. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that your predicament is on my mind, a sharp-edged crumb of discomfort which won’t whisk away or dissolve or fall off, and when I move or think or swallow, it gigs me.

 

“I suppose the aspect that gigs me the most is ‘injustice.’ Injustice is not an isolated homogeneous area any more than justice is. A law is a law and is either breached or not, but justice is reciprocal. That such a thing should have happened to you is a greater injustice than if it happened to most representatives of this exploding population.

 

“I know exactly why, too. It is an injustice because you are on the side of the angels (who, by the way, stand a little silent for you just now). You are in the small company of Good Guys. You are that, not by any process of intellectualization and decision, but reflexively, instantly, from the glands, whether it shows at the checkout in a supermarket where you confront the Birchers, or in a poolroom facing down a famous bully, or in pulling out gut by the hank and reeling it up on the platen of your typewriter.

 

“There is no lack of love in the world, but there is a profound shortage in places to put it. I don’t know why it is, but most people who, like yourself, have an inherent ability to claw their way up the sheerest rock faces around, have little of it or have so equipped themselves with spikes and steel hooks that you can’t see it. When it shows in such a man—like it does in you—when it lights him up, it should be revered and cared for. This is the very nub of the injustice done you. It should not happen at all, but if it must happen, it should not happen to you.

 

“You have cause for many feelings, Harlan: anger, indignation, regret, grief. Theodor Reik, who has done some brilliant anatomizations of love, declares that its ending is in none of these things: if it is, there is a good possibility that some or one or all of them were there all along. It is ended with indifference—really ended with a real indifference. This is one of the saddest things I know. And in all my life, I have found one writer, once, who was able to describe the exact moment when it came, and it is therefore the saddest writing I have ever read. I give it to you now in your sadness. The principle behind the gift is called ‘counter-irritation.’ Read it in good health—eventual. I would like you to know that if it helps and sustains you at all, have my respect and affection. Yours, T. H. Sturgeon.”

 

Thus ended the letter that helped and sustained me. Enclosed with the letter was No. 20 of “Twenty Love Poems based on the Spanish of Pablo Neruda”, by Christofer Logue. From Songs, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1959. It is this freedom of giving, this ability and anxiousness to meet love and give it freely in all its forms, that makes Sturgeon the mythical creature that he is. Complex, tormented, struggling, blessed by incredible gentleness and, above all, enormously talented, what you have just read is the soul of Theodore Sturgeon. I pray you, go on now to the very best thing to be found in all writers: a sample of the work that motivates the life that is led. And thank you.

 

* * * *

 

IF ALL MEN WERE BROTHERS,

WOULD YOU LET ONE MARRY YOUR SISTER?

 

by Theodore Sturgeon

 

 

The Sun went Nova in the year 33 A.E. “A.E.” means “After the Exodus.” You might say the Exodus was a century and a half or so A.D. if “A.D.” means “After the Drive.” The Drive, to avoid technicalities, was a device somewhat simpler than Woman and considerably more complicated than sex, which caused its vessel to cease to exist here while simultaneously appearing there, by­passing the limitations imposed by the speed of light. One might compose a quite impressive account of astrogation involving the Drive, with all the details of orientation here and there and the somewhat philosophical diffi­culties of establishing the relationships between them, but this is not that kind of a science fiction story.

 

It suits our purposes rather to state that the Sun went Nova with plenty of warning, that the first fifty years A.D. were spent in improving the Drive and exploring with unmanned vehicles which located many planets suitable for human settlement, and that the next hundred years were spent in getting humanity ready to leave. Nat­urally there developed a number of ideological groups with a most interesting assortment of plans for one Per­fect Culture or another, most of which were at bitter odds with all the rest. The Drive, however, had presented Earth with so copious a supply of new worlds, with insignificant subjective distances between them and the parent, that dissidents need not make much of their dis­sent, but need merely file for another world and they would get it. The comparisons between the various cul­tural theories are pretty fascinating, but this is not that kind of a science fiction story either. Not quite.

 

Anyway, what happened was that, with a margin of a little more than three decades, Terra depopulated itself by its many thousands of ships to its hundreds of worlds (leaving behind, of course, certain die-hards who died, of course, certainly) and the new worlds were established with varying degrees of bravery and a pretty wide representation across the success scale.

 

It happened, however (in ways much too recondite to be described in this kind of a science fiction story), that Drive Central on Earth, a computer central, was not only the sole means of keeping track of all the worlds; it was their only means of keeping track with one another; and when this installation added its bright brief speck to the ocean of Nova-glare, there simply was no way for all the worlds to find one another without the arduous process of unmanned Drive-ships and search. It took a long while for any of the new worlds to develop the necessary technology, and an even longer while for it to be productively operational, but at length, on a planet which called itself Terratu (the suffix meaning both “too” and “2”) be­cause it happened to be the third planet of a GO-type sun, there appeared something called the Archives, a sort of index and clearinghouse for all known inhabited worlds, which made this planet the communications cen­tral and general dispatcher for trade with them all and their trade with one another-a great convenience for everyone. A side result, of course, was the conviction on Terratu that, being a communications central, it was also central to the universe and therefore should control it, but then, that is the occupational hazard of all conscious entities.

 

We are now in a position to determine just what sort of a science fiction story this really is.

 

* * * *

 

“Charli Bux,” snapped Charli Bux, “to see the Archive Master.”

 

“Certainly,” said the pretty girl at the desk, in the cool tones reserved by pretty girls for use on hurried and in­dignant visitors who are clearly unaware, or uncaring, that the girl is pretty. “Have you an appointment?”

 

He seemed like such a nice young man in spite of his hurry and his indignation. The way, however, in which he concealed all his niceness by bringing his narrowed eyes finally to rest on her upturned face, and still showed no signs of appreciating her pretty-girlhood, made her quite as not-pretty as he was not-nice.

 

“Have you,” he asked coldly, “an appointment book?”

 

She had no response to that, because she had such a book; it lay open in front of her. She put a golden and escalloped fingernail on his name therein inscribed, com­pared it and his face with negative enthusiasm, and ran the fingernail across the time noted. She glanced at the clockface set into her desk, passed her hand over a stud, and said, “A Mr. Charli-uh-Bux to see you, Archive Master.”

 

“Send him in,” said the stud.

 

“You may go in now.”

 

“I know,” he said shortly.

 

“I don’t like you.”

 

“What?” he said; but he was thinking about something else, and before she could repeat the remark he had dis­appeared through the inner door.

 

The Archive Master had been around long enough to expect courtesy, respect, and submission, to get these things, and to like them. Charli Bux slammed into the room, banged a folio down on the desk, sat down unin­vited, leaned forward and roared redly, “Goddamit-”

 

The Archive Master was not surprised because he had been warned. He had planned exactly what he would do to handle this brash young man, but faced with the size of the Bux temper, he found his plans somewhat less use­ful than worthless. Now he was surprised, because a single glance at his gaping mouth and feebly fluttering hands-a gesture he thought he had lost and forgotten long ago-accomplished what no amount of planning could have done.

 

“Oh-h-h . . . bitchballs,” growled Bux, his anger visibly deflating. “Buggerly bangin’ bumpkin’ bitchballs” He looked across at the old man’s horrified eyebrows and grinned blindingly. “I guess it’s not your fault.” The grin disappeared. “But of all the hydrocephalous, drool-toothed, cretinoid runarounds I have ever seen, this was the stupidest. Do you know how many offices I’ve been into and out of with this”-he banged the heavy folio- “since I got back?”

 

The Archive Master did, but, “How many?” he asked.

 

“Too many, but only half as many as I went to before I went to Vexvelt.” With which he shut his lips with a snap and leaned forward again, beginning his bright, pene­trating gaze at the old man like twin lasers. The Archive Master found himself striving not to be the first to turn away, but the effort made him lean slowly back and back, until he brought up against his chair cushions with his chin up a little high. He began to feel a little ridiculous, as if he had been bamboozled into Indian wrestling with some stranger’s valet.

 

It was Charli Bux who turned away first, but it was not the old man’s victory, for the gaze came off his eyes as tangibly as a pressing palm might have come off his chest, and he literally slumped forward as the pressure came off. Yet if it was Charli Bux’s victory, he seemed utterly unaware of it. “I think,” he said after his long, concentrated pause, “that I’m going to tell you about that- about how I happened to get to Vexvelt. I wasn’t going to-or at least, I was ready to tell you only as much as I thought you needed to know. But I remember what I had to go through to get there, and I know what I’ve been going through since I got back, and it looks like the same thing. Well, it’s not going to be the same thing. Here and now, the runaround stops. What takes its place I don’t know, but by all the horns of all the owls in Hell’s northeast, I have been pushed around my last push. All right?”

 

If this was a plea for agreement, the Archive Master did not know what he would be agreeing to. He said diplo­matically, “I think you’d better begin somewhere.” Then he added, not raising his voice, but with immense au­thority, “And quietly.”

 

Charli Bux gave him a boom of laughter. “I never yet spent upwards of three minutes with anybody that they didn’t shush me. Welcome to the Shush Charli Club, membership half the universe, potential membership, everybody else. And I’m sorry. I was born and brought up on Biluly where there’s nothing but trade wind and split-rock ravines and surf, and the only way to whisper is to shout.” He went on more quietly, “But what I’m talk­ing about isn’t that sort of shushing. I’m talking about a little thing here and a little thing there and adding them up and getting the idea that there’s a planet nobody knows anything about.”

 

“There are thousands-”

 

“I mean a planet nobody wants you to know anything about.”

 

“I suppose you’ve heard of Magdilla.”

 

“Yes, with fourteen kinds of hallucinogenic microspores spread through the atmosphere, and carcinogens in the water. Nobody wants to go there, nobody wants anybody to go-but nobody stops you from getting information about it. No, I mean a planet not ninety-nine percent Terran Optimum, or ninety-nine point ninety-nine, but so many nines that you might just as well shift your base reference and call Terra about ninety-seven percent in comparison.”

 

“That would be a little like saying ‘one hundred two percent normal,’” said the Master smugly.

 

“If you like statistical scales better than the truth,” Bux growled. “Air, water, climate, indigenous flora and fauna, and natural resources six nines or better, just as easy to get to as any place else-and nobody knows anything about it. Or if they do, they pretend they don’t. And if you pin them down, they send you to another depart­ment.”

 

The Archive Master spread his hands. “I would say the circumstances prove themselves. If there is no trade with this, uh, remarkable place, it indicates that what­ever it has is just as easily secured through established routes.”

 

Bux shouted, “In a pig’s bloody and protruding-” and then checked himself and wagged his head ruefully. “Sorry again, Archive Master, but I just been too mad about this for too long. What you just said is like a couple troglodytes sitting around saying there’s no use building a house because everybody’s living in caves.” Seeing the closed eyes, the long white fingers tender on the white temples, Bux said, “I said I was sorry I yelled like that.”

 

“In every city,” said the Archive Master patiently, “on every settled human planet in all the known universe, there is a free public clinic where stress reactions of any sort may be diagnosed, treated or prescribed for, speedily, effectively, and with dignity. I trust you will not regard it as an intrusion on your privacy if I make the admittedly non-professional observation (you see, I do not pretend to be a therapist) that there are times when a citizen is not himself aware that he is under stress, even though it may be clearly, perhaps painfully obvious to others. It would not be a discourtesy, would it, or an unkindness, for some understanding stranger to suggest to such a citizen that-”

 

“What you’re saying, all wrapped up in words, is I ought to go have my head candled.”

 

“By no means. I am not qualified. I did, however, think that a visit to a clinic-there’s one just a step away from here-might make-ah-communications between us more possible. I would be glad to arrange another appoint­ment for you, when you’re feeling better. That is to say, when you are . . . ah . . .” He finished with a bleak smile and reached toward the calling stud.

 

Moving almost like a Drive-ship, Bux seemed to cease to exist on the visitor’s chair and reappeared instanta­neously at the side of the desk, a long, thick arm extended and a meaty hand blocking the way to the stud. “Hear me out first,” he said softly. Really softly. It was a much more astonishing thing than if the Archive Master had trumpeted like an elephant. “Hear me out. Please.”

 

The old man withdrew his hand, but folded it with the other and set the neat stack of fingers on the edge of the desk. It looked like stubbornness. “I have a limited amount of time, and your folio is very large.”

 

It’s large because I’m a bird dog for detail-that’s not a brag, it’s a defect: sometimes I just don’t know when to quit. I can make the point quick enough-all that material just supports it. Maybe a tenth as much would do, but you see, I-well, I give a damn. I really give a high, wide, heavy damn about this. Anyway-you just pushed the right button in Charli Bux. ‘Make communication be­tween us more possible.’ Well, all right. I won’t cuss, I won’t holler, and I won’t take long.”

 

“Can you do all these things?”

 

“You’re goddam-whoa, Charli.” He flashed the thirty-thousand-candlepower smile and then hung his head and took a deep breath. He looked up again and said quietly, “I certainly can, sir.”

 

“Well, then.” The Archive Master waved him back to the visitor’s chair: Charli Bux, even a contrite Charli Bux, stood just too tall and too wide. But once seated, he sat silent for so long that the old man shifted impatiently. Charli Bux looked up alertly, and said, “Just getting it sorted out, sir. A good deal of it’s going to sound as if you could diagnose me for a stun-shot and a good long stay at the funny farm, yeah, and that without being modest about your professional knowledge. I read a story once about a little girl was afraid of the dark because there was a little hairy purple man with poison fangs in the closet, and everybody kept telling her no, no, there’s no such thing, be sensible, be brave. So they found her dead with like snakebite and her dog killed a little hairy purple and so on. Now if I told you there was some sort of a conspiracy to keep me from getting information about a planet, and I finally got mad enough to go there and see for myself, and ‘They’ did their best to stop me; ‘They’ won me a sweepstake prize trip to somewhere else that would use up my vacation time; when I turned that down ‘They’ told me there was no Drive Guide orbiting the place, and it was too far to reach in real space (and that’s a God, uh, doggone lie, sir!) and when I found a way to get there by hops, ‘They’ tangled up my credit records so I couldn’t buy passage; why, then I can’t say I’d blame you for peggin’ me paranoid and doing me the kindness of getting me cured. Only thing was, these things did happen and they were not delusions, no matter what everybody plus two thirds of Charli Bux (by the time ‘They’ were done with me) believed. I had an ounce of evidence and I believed it. I had a ton of opinion say­ing otherwise. I tell you, sir, I had to go. I had to stand knee-deep in Vexvelt sweet grass with the cedar smell of a campfire and a warm wind in my face,’ and my hands in the hands of a girl called Tyng, along with my heart and my hope and a dazzling wonder colored like sunrise and tasting like tears, “before I finally let myself believe I’d been right all along, and there is a planet called Vexvelt and it does have all the things I knew it had,” and more, more, oh, more than I’ll ever tell you about, old man. He fell silent, his gaze averted and lumi­nous.

 

“What started you on this-this quest?”

 

Charli Bux threw up his big head and looked far away and back at some all-but-forgotten detail. “Huh! ‘D almost lost that in the clutter. Workin’ for Interworld Bank & Trust, feeding a computer in the clearinghouse. Not as dull as you might think. Happens I was a mineralogist for a spell, and the cargoes meant something to me be­sides a name, a quantity and a price. Huh!” came the surprised I’ve-found-it! little explosion. “I can tell you the very item. Feldspar. It’s used in porcelain and glass, antique style. I got a sticky mind, I guess. Long as I’d been there, feldspar ground and bagged went for about twenty-five credits a ton at the docks. But here was on of our customers bringing it in for eight and a half F.O.B. I called the firm just to check; mind, I didn’t care much, but a figure like that could color a statistical summary of imports and exports for years. The bookkeeper there ran a check and found it was so: eight and a half a ton, high-grade feldspar, ground and bagged. Some broker on Lethe: they hadn’t been able to contact him again.

 

“It wasn’t worth remembering until I bumped into another one. Niobium this time. Some call it columbium. Helps make steel stainless, among other things. I’d never seen a quotation for rod stock at less than a hundred and thirty-seven, but here was some-not much, mind you-at ninety credits delivered. And some sheets too, about thirty percent less than I’d ever seen it before, freight paid. I checked that one out too. It was correct. Well smelted and pure, the man said. I forgot that one too, or I thought I had. That there was that space-hand.” Moxie Magiddle-honest!-that was his name. Squint-eyed little fellow with a great big laugh bulging the walls of the honkytonk out at the spaceport. Drank only alcohol and never touched a needle. Told me the one about the fellow had a big golden screwhead in his belly button. Told me about times and places all over-full of yarns_t a wonderful gift for yarning, “Just mentioned in passing that Lethe was one place where the law was ‘Have Fun’ and nobody ever broke it. The whole place just one big transfer point and rest-and-rehab. A water world with only one speck of land in the tropics. Always warm, always easy. No industry, no agriculture, just-well, serv­ices. Thousands of men spent hundreds of thousands of credits, a few dozen pocketed millions. Everybody happy. I mentioned the feldspar, I guess just so I would sound as if I knew something about Lethe too.” And laid a big fat egg, too. Moxie looked at me as if he hadn’t seen me before and didn’t like what he saw. If it was a lie I was telling it was a stupid one. “Y’don’t dig feldspar out of a swamp, fella, you puttin’ me on, or you kiddin y’rself?” And a perfectly good evening dried up and blew away. “He said it couldn’t possibly have come from Lethe-it’s a water world. I guess I could have forgotten that too but for the coffee beans. Blue Mountain Coffee, it was called; the label claimed it descended in an unbroken line from Old Earth, on an island called Jamaica. It went on to say that it could be grown only in high cool land in the tropics-a real mountain plant. I liked it better than any coffee I ever tasted but when I went back for more they were sold out. I got the manager to look in the records and traced it back through the Terratu whole­saler to the broker and then to the importer-I mean, I liked that coffee!”

 

“And according to him, it came from Lethe. High cool mountain land and all. The port at Lethe was tropical all right, but to be cool it would have to have mountains that were really mountains.

 

“The feldspar that did, but couldn’t have, come from Lethe-and at those prices I-reminded me of the nio­bium, so I checked on that one too. Sure enough-Lethe again. You don’t-you just do not get pure niobium rod and sheet without mines and smelters and mills.

 

“Next off-day I spent here at Archives and got the history of Lethe halfway back, I’ll swear, to Ylem and the Big Bang. It was a swamp, it practically always has been a swamp, and something was wrong.

 

“Mind you, it was only a little something, and probably there was a good simple explanation. But little or not, it bothered me.” And besides, it had made me look like a horse’s ass in front of a damn good man. Old man, if I told you how much time I hung around the spaceport looking for that bandy-legged little space-gnome, you’d stop me now and send for the stun-guns. Because I was obsessed-not a driving addiction kind of thing, but a very small deep splinter-in-the-toe kind of thing, that didn’t hurt much but never failed to gig me every single step I took. And then one day-oh, months later-there was old Moxie Magiddle, and he took the splinter out. Hyuh! Oll Moxie…he didn’t know me at first, he really didn’t. Funny little guy, he has his brains rigged to forget any­thing he doesn’t like-honestly forget it. That feldspar thing, when a fella he liked to drink with and yarn to showed up to be a know-it-all kind of liar, and to boot, too dumb to know he couldn’t get away with it-well, that qualified Charli for zero minus the price of five man-hours of drinking. Then when I got him cornered-I all but wrestled him-and told about the feldspar and the niobium and now the mountain-grown coffee, all of it checked and cross-checked, billed, laded, shipped, insured-all of it absolutely Lethe and here’s the goddam proof, why, he began to laugh till he cried, a little at him­self, a little at the situation, and a whole lot at me. Then we had a long night of it and I drank alcohol and you know what? I’ll never in life find out how Moxie Magiddle can hold so much liquor. But he told me where those shipments came from, and gave me a vague idea why nobody wanted much to admit it. And the name they call all male Vexveltians. “I mentioned it one day to a cargo handler,” Bux told the Archive Master, “and he solved the mystery-the feldspar and niobium and coffee came from Vexvelt and had been transshipped at Lethe by local brokers, who, more often than not, get hold of some goods and turn them over to make a credit or so and dive back into the local forgetteries.

 

“But any planet which could make a profit on goods of this quality at such prices-transshipped, yet, I-certainly could do much better direct. Also, niobium is Element 41, and Elkhart’s Hypothesis has it that, on any planet where you find elements in Periods Three to Five, chances are you’ll find ‘em all. And that coffee! I used to lie awake at night wondering what they had on Vexvelt that they liked too much to ship, if they thought so little of their coffee that they’d let it out.

 

“Well, it was only natural that I came here to look up Vexvelt. Oh, it was listed at the bank, all right, but if there ever had been trade, it had been cleared out of the records long ago-we wipe the memory cells every fifty years on inactive items. I know at least that it’s been wiped four times, but it could have been blank the last three.

 

“What do you think Archives has on Vexvelt?”

 

The Archive Master did not answer. He knew what Archives had on the subject of Vexvelt. He knew where it was, and where it was not. He knew how many times this stubborn young man had been back worrying at the mystery, how many ingenious approaches he had made to the problem, how little he had gotten, how much less he or anyone would get if they tried it today. He said nothing.

 

Charli Bux held up fingers to count. “Astronomical: no observations past two light-years. Nothing but sister planets (all dead) and satellites within two light-years. Cosmological: camera scan, if ever performed (but it must have been performed, or the damn thing wouldn’t even be listed at all!), missing and never replaced. So there’s no way of finding out where in real space it is, even. Geological: unreported. Anthropological: unreported. Then there’s some stuff about local hydrogen tension and emission of the parent star, but they’re not much help. And the summation in Trade Extrapolation: untraded. Reported undesirable. Not a word as to who reported it or why he said it.

 

“I tried to sidle into it by looking up manned explora­tion, but I could find only three astronauts’ names in con­nection with Vexvelt. Troshan. He got into some sort of trouble when he came back and was executed-we used to kill certain criminals six, seven hundred years ago, did you know that?-but I don’t know what for. Anyway, they apparently did it before he filed his report. Then Balrou. Oh-Balrou-he did report. I can tell you his whole re­port word for word: ‘In view of conditions on Vexvelt contact is not recommended,’ period. By the word, that must be the most expensive report ever filed.”

 

It was, said the Archive Master, but he did not say it aloud.

 

“And then somebody called Allman explored Vexvelt but-how did the report put it-’it was found on his re­turn that Allman was suffering from confinement fatigue and his judgment was so severely impaired that his re­port is discounted.’ Does that mean it was destroyed, Archive Master?”

 

Yes, thought the old man, but he said, “I can’t say.”

 

“So there you are,” said Charli Bux. “If I wanted to pre­sent a classic case of what the old books called per­secution mania, I’d just have to report things exactly as they happened. Did I have a right to suspect, even, that ‘They’ had picked me as the perfect target and set up those hints-low-cost feldspar, high-quality coffee-bait I couldn’t miss and couldn’t resist. Did I have the right to wonder if a living caricature with a comedy name- Moxie for-God’s-sake Magiddle-was working for Them? Then, what happened next, when I honestly and openly filed for Vexvelt as my next vacation destination? I was told there was no Drive Guide orbiting Vexvelt-it could only be reached through normal space. That happens to be a lie, but there’s no way of checking on it here, or even on Lethe-Moxie never knew. Then I filed for Vexvelt via Lethe and a real-space transport, and was told that Lethe was not recommended as a tourist stop and there was no real-space service from there anyhow. So I filed for Botil, which I know is a tourist stop, and which I know has real-space shuttles and charter boats, and which the star charts call Kricker III while Lethe is Kricker IV, and that’s when I won the God-uh, the sweepstakes and a free trip to beautiful, beautiful Zeenip, paradise of para­dises with two indoor thirty-six-hole golf courses and free milk baths. I gave it to some charity or other, I said to save on taxes, and went for my tickets to Botil, the way I’d planned. I had it all to do over because they’d wiped the whole transaction when they learned about the sweepstakes. It seemed reasonable but it took so long to set it all up again that I missed the scheduled transport and lost a week of my vacation. Then when I went to pay for the trip my credit showed up zero, and it took another week to straighten out that regrettable error. By that time the tour service had only one full passage open, and in view of the fact that the entire tour would outlast my vacation by two weeks, they wiped the whole deal again-they were quite sure I wouldn’t want it.”

 

Charli Bux looked down at his hands and squeezed them. The Archives Office was filled with a crunching sound. Bux did not seem to notice it. “I guess anybody in his right mind would have got the message by then, but ‘They’ had underestimated me. Let me tell you exactly what I mean by that. I don’t mean that I am a man of steel and by the Lord when my mind is made up it stays made. And I’m not making brags about the courage of my convictions. I had very little to be convinced about, except that there was a whole chain of coincidences which nobody wanted to explain even though the ex­planation was probably foolishly simple. And I never thought I was specially courageous.

 

“I was just-scared. Oh, I was frustrated and I was mad, but mostly I was scared. If somebody had come along with a reasonable explanation I’d’ve forgotten the whole thing. If someone had come back from Vexvelt and it was a poison planet (with a pocket of good feldspar and one clean mountainside) I’d have laughed it off. But the whole sequence-especially the last part, trying to book passage-really scared me. I reached the point where the only thing that would satisfy me as to my own sanity was to stand and walk on Vexvelt and know what it was. And that was the one thing I wasn’t being allowed to do. So I couldn’t get my solid proof and who’s to say I wouldn’t spend the next couple hundred years wondering when I’d get the next little splinter down deep in my toe? A man can suffer from a thing, Master, but then he can also suf­fer for fear of suffering from a thing. No, I was scared and I was going to stay scared until I cleared it up.”

 

“My.” The old man had been silent, listening, for so long that his voice was new and arresting. “It seems to me that there was a much simpler way out. Every city on every human world has free clinics where-”

 

“That’s twice you’ve said that,” crackled Charli Bux. “I have something to say about that, but not now. As to my going to a patch-up parlor, you know as well as I do that they don’t change a thing. They just make you feel good about being the way you are.”

 

“I fail to see the distinction, or what is wrong if there is one.”

 

“I had a friend come up to me and tell me he was going to die of cancer in the next eight weeks, ‘just in time,’ he says, and whacks me so hard I see red spots, ‘just in time for my funeral,’ and off he goes down the street whooping like a loon.”

 

“Would it be better if he huddled in his bed terrified and in pain?”

 

“I can’t answer that kind of a question, but I do know what I saw is just as wrong. Anyway-there was some­thing out there called Vexvelt, and it wouldn’t make me feel any better to get rolled through a machine and come out thinking there isn’t something called Vexvelt, and don’t tell me that’s not what those friendly helpful spot removers would do to me.”

 

“But don’t you see, you’d no longer be-”

 

“Call me throwback. Call me radical if you want to, or ignorant.” Charli Bux’s big voice was up again and he seemed angry enough not to care. “Ever hear that old line about ‘in every fat man there’s a thin man screaming to get out?’ I just can’t shake the idea that if something is so, you can prick, poke and process me till I laugh and scratch and giggle and admit it ain’t so after all, and even go out and make speeches and persuade other people, but away down deep there’ll be a me with its mouth taped shut and its hands tied, bashing up against my guts trying to get out and say it is so after all. But what are we talking about me for? I came here to talk about Vexvelt.”

 

“First tell me something-do you really think there was a ‘They’ who wanted to stop you?”

 

“Hell no. I think I’m up against some old-time stupid­ity that got itself established and habitual, and that’s how come there’s no information in the files. I don’t think anybody today is all that stupid. I like to think people on this planet can look at the truth and not let it scare them. Even if it scares them they can think it through. As to that rat race with the vacation bookings, there seemed to be a good reason for each single thing that happened. Science and math have done a pretty good job of ex­plaining the mechanics of ‘the bad break’ and ‘a lucky run,’ but neither one of them ever got repealed.”

 

“So.” The Master tented his fingers and looked down at the ridgepole. “And just how did you manage to get to Vexvelt after all?”

 

Bux flicked on his big bright grin. “I hear a lot about this free society, and how there’s always someone out to trim an edge off here and a corner there. Maybe there’s something in it, but so far they haven’t got around to tak­ing away a man’s freedom to be a damn fool. Like, for example, his freedom to quit his job. I’ve said it was just a gruesome series of bad breaks, but bad breaks can be out­witted just as easily as a superpowerful masterminding ‘They.’ Seems to me most bad breaks happen inside a man’s pattern. He gets out of phase with it and every step he takes is between the steppin’stones. If he can’t phase in, and if he tries to maintain his pace, why there’s a whole row of stones ahead of him laid just exactly where each and every one of them will crack his shins. What he should do is head upstream. It might be unknown terri­tory, and there might be dangers, but one thing for sure, there’s a whole row of absolutely certain, absolutely planned agonies he is just not going to have to suffer.”

 

“How did you get to Vexvelt?”

 

“I told you.” He waited, then smiled. “I’ll tell you again.”

 

“I quit my job. ‘They,’ or the ‘losing streak,’ or the stinking lousy Fates, or whatever had a bead on me-they could do it to me because they always knew where I was, when I’d be the next place, and what I wanted. So they were al­ways waiting for me. So I headed upstream. I waited till my vacation was over and left the house without any luggage and went to my local bank and had all my credits before I could have any tough breaks. Then I took a Drive jumper to Lunatu, booked passage on a semi-freight to Lethe.”

 

“You booked passage, but you never boarded the ship.”

 

“You know?”

 

“I was asking.”

 

“Oh,” said Charli Bux. “Yeah, I never set foot in that cozy little cabin. What I did, I slid down the cargo chute and got buried in Hold Number Two with a ton of oats. I was in an interesting position, Archive Master. In a way I’m sorry nobody dug me out to ask questions. You’re not supposed to stow away but the law says-and I know exactly what it says-that a stowaway is someone who rides a vessel without booking passage. But I did book passage, and paid in full, and all my papers were in order for where I was going. What made things a lot easier, too, was that where I was going nobody gives much of a damn about papers.”

 

“And you felt you could get to Vexvelt through Lethe.”

 

“I felt I had a chance, and I knew of no other. Cargoes from Vexvelt had been put down on Lethe, or I wouldn’t have been sucked into this thing in the first place. I didn’t know if the carrier was Vexveltian or a tramp (if it was a liner I’d have known it) or when one might come or if it would be headed for Vexvelt when it departed. All I knew was that Vexvelt had shipped here for sure, and this was the only place where maybe they might be back. Do you know what goes on at Lethe?”

 

“It has a reputation.”

 

“Do you know?”

 

The old man showed a twinge of irritation. Along with respect and obedience, he had become accustomed to catechizing and not to being catechized. “Everyone knows about Lethe.”

 

Bux shook his head. “They don’t, Master.”

 

The old man lifted his hands and put them down. “That kind of thing has its function. Humanity will al­ways-”

 

“You approve of Lethe and what goes on there.”

 

“One neither approves nor disapproves,” said the Ar­chive Master stiffly. “One knows about it, recognizes that for some segments of the species such an outlet is nec­essary, realizes that Lethe makes no pretensions to being anything but what it is, and then-one accepts, one goes on to other things. How did you get to Vexvelt?”

 

“On Lethe,” said Charli Bux implacably, “you can do anything you want to or with any kind of human being, or any number of combinations of them, as long as you can pay for it.”

 

“I wouldn’t doubt it. Now, the next leg of your trip-”

 

“There are men,” said Charli Bux, suddenly and shock­ingly quiet, “who can be attracted by disease-by sores, Archive Master, by the stumps of amputated limbs. There are people on Lethe who cultivate diseases to attract such men. Crones, Master, with dirty leather skin, and boys and little-”

 

“You will cease this nauseating-”

 

“In just a minute. One of the unwritten and unbreak­able traditions of Lethe is that, what anyone pays to do, anyone else may pay to watch.”

 

“Are you finished?” It was not Bux who shouted now.

 

“You accept Lethe. You condone Lethe.”

 

“I have not said I approve.”

 

“You trade with Lethe.”

 

“Well, of course we do. That doesn’t mean we-”

 

“The third day-night, rather, that I was there,” I said overriding what was surely about to turn into a helpless sputter, “I turned off one of the main streets into an alley. I knew this might be less than wise, but at the mo­ment there was an ugly fight going on between me and the corner, and some wild gunning. I was going to turn right and go to the other avenue anyway, and I could see it clearly through the alley.

 

“I couldn’t describe to you how fast this happened, or explain where they came from-eight of them, I think, in an alley, not quite dark and very narrow, when only a minute before I had been able to see it from end to end.

 

“I was grabbed from all sides all over my body, lifted, slammed down flat on my back and a bright light jammed in my face.

 

“A woman said, “Aw shoot, ‘tain’t him.’ A man’s voice said to let me up. They picked me up. Somebody even started dusting me off. The woman who had held the light began to apologize. She did it quite nicely. She said they had heard that there was a-Master, I wonder if I should use the word.”

 

“How necessary do you feel-”

 

“Oh, I guess I don’t have to; you know it. On any ship, any construction gang, in any farm community-anywhere where men work or gather, it’s the one verbal bullet which will and must start a fight. If it doesn’t, the victim will never regain face. The woman used it as cas­ually as she would have said Terran or Lethean. She said there was one right here in town and they meant to get him. I said, “Well, how about that.’ It’s the one phrase I know that can be said any time about anything. Another woman said I was a good big one and how would I like to tromp him. One of the men said all right, but he called for the head. Another began to fight him about it, and a third woman took off her shoe and slapped both their faces with one swing of the muddy sole. She said for them to button it up or next time she’d use the heel. The other woman, with the light, giggled and said Helen was Veddy Good Indeed that way. She spoke in a beautifully cultivated accent. She said Helen could hook out an eye neat as a croupier. The third woman suddenly cried out, ‘Dog turds!’ She asked for some light. The dog turds were very dry. One of the men offered to wet them down. The woman said no-they were her dog turds and she would do it herself. Then and there she squatted. She called for a light, said she couldn’t see to aim. They turned the light on her. She was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Is there something wrong, Master?”

 

“I would like you to tell me how you made contact with Vexvelt,” said the old man a little breathlessly.

 

“But I am!” said Charli Bux. One of the men pressed through, all grunting with eagerness, and began to mix the filth with his hands. And then, by a sort of sixth sense, the light was out and they were simply-gone! Disappeared. A hand came out of nowhere and pulled me back against a house wall. There wasn’t a sound-not even breathing. And only then did the Vexveltian turn into the alley. How they knew he was coming is beyond me.

 

“The hand that had pulled me back belonged to the woman with the light, as I found out in a matter of sec­onds. I really didn’t believe her hand meant to be where I found it. I took hold of it and held it, but she snatched it away and put it back. Then I felt the light bump my leg. And the man came along toward us. He was a big man, held himself straight, wore light-colored clothes, which I thought was more foolhardy than brave. He walked lightly and seemed to be looking everywhere-and still could not see us.

 

“If this all happened right this minute, after what I’ve learned about Vexvelt-about Lethe too-I wouldn’t hes­itate, I’d know exactly what to do. What you have to understand is that I didn’t know anything at all at the time. Maybe it was the eight against one that annoyed me.” He paused thoughtfully. “Maybe that coffee. What I’m trying to say is that I did the same thing then, in my ignorance, that I’d do now, knowing what I do.

 

“I snapped the flashlight out of the woman’s hand and got about twenty feet away in two big bounds. I turned the light on and played it back where I’d come from. Two of the men had crawled up the sheer building face like insects and were ready to drop on the victim. The beauti­ful one was crouched on her toes and one hand; the other, full of filth, was ready to throw. She made an absolutely animal sound and slung her handful, quite uselessly. The others were flattened back against wall and fence, and in the light, for a long second, they flattened all the more, blinking. I said over my shoulder, “Watch yourself, friend. You’re the guest of honor, I think.’

 

“You know what he did? He laughed. I said, ‘They won’t get by me for a while. Take off.’ ‘What for?’ says he, squeezing past me. There’s only eight of them.’ And he marches straight down on them.

 

“Something rolled under my foot and I picked it up-half a brick. What must have been the other half of it hit me right on the breastbone. It made me yelp, I couldn’t help it. The tall man said to douse the light, I was a target. I did, and saw one of the men in silhouette against the street at the far end, standing up from behind a big gar­bage can. He was holding a knife half as long as his forearm, and he rose up as the big man passed him. I let fly with the brick and got him right back of the head. The tall man never so much as turned when he heard him fall and the knife go skittering. He passed one of the human flies as if he had forgotten he was there, but he hadn’t for­gotten. He reached up and got both the ankles and swung the whole man screaming off the wall like a flail, wiping the second one off and tumbling the both of them on top of the rest of the gang.

 

“He stood there with the back of his hands on his hips for a bit, not even breathing hard, watching the crying, cursing mix-up all over the alley pavement I came up beside him. One, two got to their feet and ran limping. One of the women began to scream-curses, I suppose, but you couldn’t hear the words. I turned the light on her face and she shut right up.

 

“You all right?’ says the tall man.

 

“I told him, ‘Caved in my chest is all, but that’s all right, I can use it for a fruit bowl lying in bed.’ He laughed and turned his back on the enemy and led me the way he had come. He said he was Vorhidin from Vexvelt. I told him who I was. I said I’d been looking for a Vexveltian, but before we could go on with that a black hole opened up to the left and somebody whispered, ‘Quick, quick.’ Vorhidin clapped a hand on my back and gave me a little shove. ‘In you go, Charli Bux of Terratu.’ And in we went, me stumbling all over my feet down some steps I didn’t know were there, and then again because they weren’t there. A big door boomed closed behind us. Dim yellow light came on. There was a little man with olive skin and shiny, oily mustachios. ‘Vorhidin, for the love of God, I told you not to come into town, they’ll kill you,’ Vorhidin only said, ‘This is Charli Bux, a friend.’ The little man came forward anxiously and began to pat Vorhidin on the arms and ribs to see if he was all right.

 

“Vorhidin laughed and brushed him off. ‘Poor Tretti! He’s always afraid something is going to happen! Never mind me, you fusspot. See to Charli here. He took a shot in the bows that was meant for me.’ The little one, Tretti, sort of squeaked and before I could stop him he had my shirt open and the light out of my hand switched on and trained on the bruise. Tour next woman can admire a sunset,’ says Vorhidin. Tretti’s away and back before you can blink and sprays on something cool and good andmost of the pain vanished.

 

‘“What do you have for us?” and Tretti carries the light into another room. There’s stacks of stuff, mostly manu­factured goods, tools and instruments. There was a big pile of trideo cartridges, mostly music and new plays, but a novel or so too. Most of the other stuff was one of a kind. Vorhidin picked up a forty-pound crate and spun it twice by diagonal corners till it stopped where he could read the label. ‘Molar spectroscope. Most of this stuff we don’t really need but we like to see what’s being done, how it’s designed. Sometimes ours are better, sometimes not. We like to see, that’s all.’ He set it down gently and reached into his pocket and panned out a dozen or more stones that flashed till it hurt. One of them, a blue one, made its own light. He took Tretti’s hand and pulled it to him and poured it full of stones. ‘That enough for this load?’ I couldn’t help it-I glanced around the place and totted it up and made a stab estimate-a hundred each of everything in the place wouldn’t be worth that one blue stone. Tretti was goggle-eyed. He couldn’t speak. Vorhi­din wagged his head and laughed and said, ‘All right, then,’ and reached into his pants pocket again and ladled out four or five more. I thought Tretti was going to cry. I was right. He cried.

 

“We had something to eat and I told Vorhidin how I happened to be here. He said he’d better take me along. I said where to? and he said Vexvelt. I began to laugh. I told him I was busting my brains trying to figure some way to make him say that, and he laughed too and said I’d found it, all right, twice over. ‘Owe you a favor for that,” he says, dipping his head at the alley side of the room. ‘Reason two, you wouldn’t live out the night on Lethe if you stayed here.’ I wanted to know why not, because from what I’d seen there were fights all the time, then you’d see the fighters an hour later drinking out of the same bowl. He says it’s not the same thing. Nobody helps a Vexveltian but a Vexveltian. Help one, you are one, far as Lethe was concerned. So I wanted to know what Lethe had against Vexvelt, and he stopped chewing and looked at me a long time as if he didn’t understand me. Then he said, “You really don’t know anything about us, do you?” I said, not much. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘now there’s three good reasons to bring you.’

 

“Tretti opened the double doors at the far end of the storeroom. There was a ground van in there, with another set of doors into the street. We loaded the crates into it and got in, Vorhidin at the tiller. Tretti climbed a lad­der and put his eyes to something and spun a wheel. ‘Periscope,’ Vorhidin told me. ‘Looks like a flagpole from outside.’ Tretti waved his hand at us. He had tears run­ning down his cheeks again. He hit a switch and the doors banged out of the way. The van screeched out of there as the doors bounced and started back. After that Vorhidin drove like a little old lady. One-way glass. Some­times I wondered what those crowds of drunks and queers would do if they could see in. I asked him, ‘What are they afraid of?’ He didn’t seem to understand the question. I said, ‘Mostly when people gang up on some­body, it’s because one way or another they’re afraid. What do they think you’re going to take away from them?’

 

“He laughed and said, ‘Their decency.’ And that’s all the talk I got out of him all the way out to the spaceport.

 

“The Vexveltian ship was parked miles away from the terminal, way the hell and gone at the far end of the pave­ment near some trees. There was a fire going near it. As we got closer I saw it wasn’t near it, it was spang under it. There was a big crowd, maybe half a hundred, mostly women, mostly drunk. They were dancing and staggering around and dragging wood up under the ship. The ship stood up on its tail like the old chemical rockets in the fairy stories. Vorhidin grunted, ‘Idiots,’ and moved some­thing on his wrist. The rocket began to rumble and everybody ran screaming. Then there was a big explosion of steam and the wood went every which way, and for a while the pavement was full of people running and falling and screaming, and cycles and ground cars milling around and bumping each other. After a while it was quiet and we pulled up close. The high hatch opened on the ship and a boom and frame came out and lowered. Vorhidin hooked on, threw the latches on the van bed, beckoned me back there with him, reached forward and set the controls of the van, and touched the thing on his wrist. The whole van cargo section started up complete with us, and the van started up and began to roll home by itself.

 

“The only crew he carried,” said Charli Bux carefully, “was a young radio officer.” With long shining black wings for hair and bits of sky in her tilted eyes, and a full and asking kind of mouth. She held Vorhidin very close, very long, laughing the message that there could be no words for this: he was safe. “Tamba, this is Charli. He’s from Terratu and he fought for me” Then she came and held him too, and she kissed him; that incredible mouth, that warm, strong, soft mouth, why, he and she shared it for an hour; for an hour he felt her lips on his, even though she had kissed him for only a second. For an hour her lips could hardly be closer to her than they were to his own astonished flesh. “The ship blasted off and headed sunward and to the celestial north. It held this course for two days. Lethe has two moons, the smaller one just a rock, an asteroid. Vorhidin matched velocities with it and hung half a kilo away, drifting in.”

 

And the first night he had swung his bunk to the after bulkhead and had lain there heavily against the thrust of the jets, and against the thrust of his heart and his loins. Never had he seen such a woman-only just become woman, at that. So joyful, so utterly and so rightly herself. Half an hour after blastoff: “Clothes are in the way on ship, don’t you think? But Vorhidin says I should ask you, because customs are different from one world to another, isn’t that so?”

 

“Here we live by your customs, not mine,” Charli had been able to say, and she had thanked him, thanked him! and touched the bit of glitter at her throat, and her gar­ment fell away. “There’s much more privacy this way” she said, leaving him. “A closed door means more to the naked; it’s closed for a real reason and not because one might be seen in one’s petticoat.” She took her garment into one of the staterooms. Vorhidin’s. Charli leaned weakly against the bulkhead and shut his eyes. Her nip­ples were like her mouth, full and asking. Vorhidin was casually naked but Charli kept his clothes on, and the Vexveltians made no comment. The night was very long. For a while part of the weight on Charli turned to anger, which helped. Old bastard, silver-temples. Old enough to be her father. But that could not last, and he smiled at himself. He remembered the first time he had gone to a ski resort. There were all kinds of people there, young, old, wealthy, working, professionals; but there was a dif­ference. The resort, because it was what it was, screened out the pasty-faced, the round-shouldered lungless sedentaries, the plumping sybarites. All about him had been clear eyes, straight backs, and skin with the cosmetics of frost and fun. Who walked idled not, but went some­where. Who sat lay back joyfully in well-earned weariness. And this was the aura of Vorhidin-not a matter of carriage and clean color and clear eyes, though he cer­tainly had all these, but the same qualities down to the bone and radiating from the mind. A difficult thing to express and a pleasure to be with. Early on the second day Vorhidin had leaned close when they were alone in the control room and asked him if he would like to sleep with Tamba tonight. Charli gasped as if he had been clapped on the navel with a handful of crushed ice. He also blushed, saying, “If she, if she-” wildly wondering how to ask her. He need not have wondered, for “He’d love to, honey,” Vorhidin bellowed. Tamba popped her face into the corridor and smiled at Charli. “Thank you so much” she said. And then (after the long night) it was going to be the longest day he had ever lived through, but she let it happen within the hour instead, sweetly, strongly, unhurried. Afterward he lay looking at her with such total and long-lasting astonishment that she laughed at him. She flooded his face with her black hair and then with her kisses and then all of him with her supple strength; this time she was fierce and most demanding until with a shout he toppled from the very peak of joy straight and instantly down into the most total slumber he had ever known. In perhaps twenty minutes he opened his eyes and found his gaze plunged deep in a blue glory, her eyes so close their lashes meshed. Later, talking to her in the wardroom, holding both her hands, he turned to find Vorhidin standing in the doorway. He was on them in one long stride, and flung an arm around each. Nothing was said. What could be said?

 

“I talked a lot with Vorhidin,’ Charli Bux said to the Archive Master. “I never met a man more sure of himself, what he wanted, what he liked, what he believed. The very first thing he said when I brought up the matter of trade was ‘Why?’ In all my waking life I never thought to ask that about trade. All I ever did, all anyone does, is to trade where he can and try to make it more. ‘Why?’ he wanted to know. I thought of the gemstones going for that production-line junk in the hold, and pure niobium at manganese prices. One trader would call that igno­rance, another would call it good business and get all he could-glass beads for ivory. But cultures have been known to trade like that for religious or ethical reasons-always give more than you get in the other fellow’s coin. Or maybe they were just-rich. Maybe there was so much Vexvelt that the only thing they could use was-well, like he said: manufactures, so they could look at the design ‘sometimes better than ours, sometimes not.’ So I asked him.

 

“He gave me a long look that was, at four feet, exactly like” drowning in the impossibly blue lakes of Tamba’s eyes, but watch yourself, don’t think about that when you talk to this old man “holding still for an X-ray conti­nuity. Finally he said, ‘Yes, I suppose we’re rich. There’s not much we need.’

 

“I told him, all the same, he could get a lot higher prices for the little he did trade. He just laughed a little and shook his head. ‘You have to pay for what you get or it’s no good. If you “trade well,” as you call it, you finish with more than you started with; you didn’t pay. That’s as unnatural as energy levels going from lesser to greater, it’s contrary to ecology and entropy.’ Then he said, ‘You don’t understand that.’ I didn’t and I don’t.’

 

“Go on.”

 

“They have their own Drive cradle back of Lethe’s moon, and their own Guide orbiting Vexvelt. I told you-all the while I thought the planet was near Lethe; well, it isn’t”

 

“Now, that I do not understand. Cradles and guides are public utilities. Two days, you say it took. Why didn’t he use the one at the Lethe port?”

 

“I can’t say, sir. Uh-”

 

“Well?”

 

“I was just thinking about that drunken mob building a fire under the ship.”

 

“Ah yes. Perhaps the moon cradle is a wise precaution after all. I have always known, and you make it eminently clear, that these people are not popular. All right-you made a Drive jump.”

 

“We made a Drive jump.” Charli fell silent for a mo­ment, reliving that breathless second of revelation as black, talc-dusted space and a lump moonlet winked away to be replaced by the great arch of a purple-haloed horizon, marbled green and gold and silver and polished blue, with a chromium glare coming from the sea on the planet’s shoulder. “A tug was standing by and we got down without trouble.” The spaceport was tiny compared even with Lethe-eight or ten docks, with the warehouse area under them and passenger and staff areas surround­ing them under a deck. “There were no formalities-I suppose there’s not enough space travel to merit them.”

 

“Certainly no strangers, at any rate,” said the old man smugly.

 

“We disembarked right on the deck and walked away.” Tamba had gone out first. It was sunny, with a warm wind, and if there was any significant difference between this gravity and that of Terrain, Charli’s legs could not detect it. In the air, however, the difference was pro­found. Never before had he known air so clear, so winy, so clean-not unless it was bitter cold, and this was warm. Tamba stood by the silent, swiftly moving “up” ramp, looking out across the foothills to the most magnificent mountain range he had ever seen, for they had every­thing a picture-book mountain should have-smooth vivid high-range, shaggy forest, dramatic gray, brown, and ocher rock cliff, and a starched white cloth of snowcap tumbled on the peaks to dry in the sun. Behind them was a wide plain with a river for one margin and foothills for the other, and then the sea, with a wide golden beach curving a loving arm around the oceans green shoulder. As he approached the pensive girl the warm wind curled and laughed down on them, and her short robe streamed from her shoulders like smoke, and fell about her again. It stopped his pace and his breath and his heart for a beat, it was so lovely a sight. And coming up beside her, watching the people below, the people rising on one ramp and sliding down the other, he realized that in this place clothing had but two conventions-ease and beauty. Man, woman, and child, they wore what they chose, ribbon or robe, clogs, coronets, cummerbunds or kilts, or a ring, or a snood, or nothing at all. He remem­bered a wonderful line he had read by a pre-Nova sage called Rudofsky, and murmured it: Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty. She turned and smiled at him; she thought it was his line. He smiled back and let her think so. “You don’t mind waiting a bit? My father will be along in a moment and then we’ll go. You’re to stay with us. Is that all right?”

 

Did he mind. Would he wait, bracketed by the thundering colors of that mountain, the adagio of the sea. Is that all right.

 

There was nothing, no way, no word to express his response but to raise his tense fists as high as he could and shout as loud as he could and then turn it into laughter and to tears.

 

Vorhidin, having checked out his manifests, joined them before Charli was finished. He had locked gazes with the girl, who smiled up at him and held his forearm in both her hands, stroking, and he laughed and laughed. “He drank too much Vexvelt all at once” she said to Vorhidin. Vorhidin put a big warm hand on Charli’s shoul­der and laughed with him until he was done. When he had his breath again, and the water-lenses out of his eyes, Tamba said, “That’s where we’re going.”

 

“Where?”

 

She pointed, very carefully. Three slender dark trees like poplars came beseeching out of a glad tumble of luminous light willow-green. “Those three trees”

 

“I can’t see a house . . .”

 

Vorhidin and Tamba laughed together: this pleased them. “Come.”

 

“We were going to wait for-”

 

“No need to wait any longer. Come.”

 

Charli said, “The house was only a short walk from the port, but you couldn’t see the one from the other. A big house, too, trees all around it and even growing up through it. I stayed with the family and worked.” He slapped the heavy folio. “All this. I got all the help I needed.”

 

“Did you indeed.” The Archive Master seemed more in­terested in this than in anything else he had heard so far. Or perhaps it was a different kind of interest. “Helped you, did they? Would you say they’re anxious to trade?”

 

The answer to this was clearly an important one. “All I can say,” Charli Bux responded carefully, “is that I asked for this information-a catalogue of the trade resources of Vexvelt, and estimates of F.O.B. prices. None of them are very far off a practical, workable arrangement, and every single one undercuts the competition. There are a number of reasons. First of all, of course, is the resources themselves-almost right across the board, unbelievably rich. Then they have mining methods like nothing you’ve ever dreamed of, and harvesting, and preserving-there’s no end to it. At first blush it looks like a pastoral planet-well, it’s not. It’s a natural treasure house that has been organized and worked and planned and understood like no other planet in die known universe. Those people have never had a war, they’ve never had to change their original cultural plan; it works, Master, it works. And it has produced a sane healthy people which, when it goes about a job, goes about it single-mindedly and with . . . well, it might sound like an odd term to use, but it’s the only one that fits: with joy. ... I can see you don’t want to hear this.”

 

The old man opened his eyes and looked directly at the visitor. At Bux’s cascade of language he had averted his face, closed his eyes, curled his lip, let his hands stray over his temples and near his ears, as if it was taking a su­preme effort to keep from clapping the palms over them.

 

“All I can hear is that a world which has been set aside by the whole species, and which has kept itself aloof, is us­ing you to promote a contact which nobody wants. Do they want it? They won’t get it, of course, but have they any idea of what their world would be like if this”-he waved at the folio-”is all true? How do they think they could control the exploiters? Have they got something special in defenses as well as all this other?”

 

“I really don’t know.”

 

“I know!” The old man was angrier than Bux had yet seen him. “What they are is their defense! No one will ever go near them, not ever. Not if they strip their whole planet of everything it has, and refine and process the lot, and haul it to their spaceport at their own expense, and give it away free.”

 

“Not even if they can cure cancer?”

 

“Almost all cancer is curable.”

 

“They can cure all cancer.”

 

“New methods are discovered every-”

 

“They’ve had the methods for I don’t know how many years. Centuries. They have no cancer”

 

“Do you know what this cure is?”

 

“No, I don’t. But it wouldn’t take a clinical team a week to find out.”

 

“The incurable cancers are not subject to clinical analy­sis. They are all deemed psychosomatic.”

 

“I know. That is exactly what the clinical team would find out.”

 

There was a long, pulsing silence. “You have not been completely frank with me, young man.”

 

“That’s right, sir.”

 

Another silence. “The implication is that they are sane and cancer-free because of the kind of culture they have set up.”

 

This time Bux did not respond, but let the old man’s words hang there to be reheard, reread. At last the Ar­chive Master spoke again in a near whisper, shaking and furious. “Abomination! Abomination!” Spittle appeared on his chin: he seemed not to know. “I would-rather- die-eaten alive-with cancer-and raving mad than live with such sanity as that.”

 

“Perhaps others would disagree.”

 

“No one would disagree! Try it? Try it! They’ll tear you to pieces I That’s what they did to Allman. That’s what they did to Balroul We killed Troshan ourselves-he was the first and we didn’t know then that the mob would do it for us. That was a thousand years ago, you understand that? And a thousand years from now the mob will still do it for us! And that-that filth will go to the locked files with the others, and someday another fool with too much Curiosity and not enough decency and his mind rotten with perversion will sit here with another Archive Master, who will send him out as I’m sending you out, to shut his mouth and save his life or open it and be torn to pieces. Get out! Get out! Get out!” His voice had risen to a shriek and then a sort of keening, and had rasped itself against itself until it was a painful forced whisper and then noth­ing at all: the old eyes glared and the chin was wet.

 

Charli Bux rose slowly. He was white with shock. He said quietly, “Vorhidin tried to tell me, and I wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I said to him, ‘I know more about greed than you do; they will not be able to resist those prices.’ I said, ‘I know more about fear than you do; they will not be able to stand against the final cancer cure.’ Vorhidin laughed at me and gave me all the help I needed.

 

“I started to tell him once that I knew more about the sanity that lives in all of us, and very much in some of us, and that it could prevail. But I knew while I was talking that I was wrong about that. Now I know that I was wrong in everything, even the greed, even the fear, and he was right. And he said Vexvelt has the most powerful and the least expensive defense ever devised-sanity. He was right.”

 

Charli Bux realized then that the old man, madly lock­ing gazes with him as he spoke, had in some way, inside his head, turned off his ears. He sat there with his old head cocked to one side, panting like a foundered dog in a dust bowl, until at last he thought he could shout again. He could not He could only rasp, he could only whisper-squeak, “Get out! Get out!”

 

Charli Bux got out. He left the folio where it was; it, like Vexvelt, defended itself by being immiscible-in the language of chemistry, by being noble.

 

It was not Tamba after all, but Tyng who captured Charli’s heart.

 

When they got to the beautiful house, so close to every­thing and yet so private, so secluded, he met the family. Breerho’s radiant-almost heat-radiant-shining red hair, and Tyng’s, showed them to be mother and daughter. Vorhid and Stren were the sons, one a child, the other in his mid-teens, were straight-backed, wide-shouldered like their father, and by the wonderful cut and tilt of their architectured eyes, were brothers to Tyng, and to Tamba.

 

There were two other youngsters, a lovely twelve-year-old girl called Fleet, who was singing when they came in, and for whose song they stopped and postponed the in­troductions, and a sturdy tumblebug of a boy they called Handr, possibly the happiest human being any of them would ever see. In time Charli met the parents of these two, and black-haired Tamba seemed much more kin to the mother than to flame-haired Breerho.

 

It was at first a cascade of names and faces, captured only partially, kaleidoscoping about in his head as they all did in the room, and making a shyness in him. But there was more love in the room than ever the peaks of his mind and heart had known before, and more care and caring.

 

Before the afternoon and evening were over, he was familiar and accepted and enchanted. And because Tamba had touched his heart and astonished his body, all his feelings rose within him and narrowed and aimed themselves on her, hot and breathless, and indeed she seemed to delight in him and kept close to him the whole time. But when the little ones went off yawning, and then others, and they were almost alone, he asked her, he begged her to come to his bed. She was kind as could be, and loving, but also completely firm in her refusal. “But, darling, I just can’t now. I can’t. I’ve been away to Lethe and now I’m back and I promised.”

 

“Promised who?”

 

“Stren.”

 

“But I thought. . .” He thought far too many things to sort out or even to isolate one from another. Well, maybe he hadn’t understood the relationships here-after all, there were four adults and six children and he’d get it straight by tomorrow who was who, because otherwise she-oh. “You mean you promised Stren you wouldn’t sleep with me.”

 

“No, my silly old dear. I’ll sleep with Stren tonight. Please, darling, don’t be upset. There’ll be other times. Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning?” She laughed and took his cheeks in her two hands and shook his whole head as if she could make the frown drop off. “Tomorrow morning very early?”

 

“I don’t mean to be like this my very first night here, I’m sorry, I guess there’s a lot I don’t understand,” he mumbled in his misery. And then anguish skyrocketed within him and he no longer cared about host and guest and new customs and all the rest of it. “I love you,” he cried, “don’t you know that?”

 

“Of course, of course I do. And I love you, and we will love one another for a long, long time. Didn’t you think I knew that?” Her puzzlement was so genuine that even through pain-haze he could see it. He said, as close to tears as he felt a grown man should ever get, that he just guessed he didn’t understand.

 

“You will, beloved, you will. Well talk about it until you do, no matter how long it takes.” Then she added, with absolutely guileless cruelty, “Starting tomorrow. But now I have to go, Stren’s waiting. Good night, true love,” and she kissed the top of his averted head and sprinted away lightly on bare tiptoe.

 

She had reached something in him that made it impos­sible for him to be angry at her. He could only hurt. He had not known until these past two days that he could feel so much or bear so much pain. He buried his face in the cushions of the long couch in the-living room?-any­way, the place where indoors and outdoors were as tan­gled as his heart, but more harmoniously-and gave himself up to sodden hurt.

 

In time, someone knelt beside him and touched him lightly on the neck. He twisted his head enough to be able to see. It was Tyng, her hair all but luminous in the dimness, and her face, what he could see of it, nothing but compassion. She said, “Would you like me to stay with you instead?” and with the absolute honesty of the stricken, he cried, “There couldn’t be anyone else instead!”

 

Her sorrow, its genuineness, was unmistakable. She told him of it, touched him once more, and slipped away. Sometime during the night he twisted himself awake enough to find the room they had given him, and found surcease in utter black exhaustion.

 

Awake in daylight, he sought his other surcease, which was work, and began his catalogue of resources. Everyone tried at one time or another to communicate with him, but unless it was work he shut it off (except, of course, for the irresistible Handr, who became his fast and life­long friend). He found Tyng near him more and more frequently, and usefully so; he had not become so surly that he would refuse a stylus or reference book (opened at the right place) when it was placed in his hand ex­actly at the moment he needed it. Tyng was with him for many hours, alert but absolutely silent, before he un­bent enough to ask her for this or that bit of information, or wondered about weights and measures and man-hour calculations done in the Vexveltian way. If she did not know, she found out with a minimum of delay and ab­solute clarity. She knew, however, a very great deal more than he had suspected. So the time came when he was chattering like a macaw, eagerly planning the next day’s work with her.

 

He never spoke to Tamba. He did not mean to hurt her, but he could sense her eagerness to respond to him and he could not bear it. She, out of consideration, just stopped trying.

 

One particularly knotty statistical sequence kept him going for two days and two nights without stopping. Tyng kept up with him all the way without complaint until, in the wee small hours of the third morning, she rolled up her eyes and collapsed. He staggered up on legs gone asleep with too much sitting, and shook the statistics out of his eyes to settle her on the thick fur rug, straighten the twisted knee. In what little light spilled from his aban­doned hooded lamp, she was exquisite, especially be­cause of his previous knowledge that she was exquisite in the most brilliant of glares. The shadows added something to the alabaster, and her unconscious pale lips were no longer darker than her face, and she seemed strangely statuesque and non-living. She was wearing a Cretan sort of dress, a tight stomacher holding the bare breasts cupped and supporting a diaphanous skirt. Troubled that the stomacher might impede her breathing, he unhooked it and put it back. The flesh of her midriff where it had been was, to the finger if not to the eye, pinched and ridged. He kneaded it gently and pursued indefinable thoughts through the haze of fatigue: pyrophyllite, Lethe, brother, recoverable vanadium salts, Vorhidin, precipi­tate, Tyng’s watching me. Tyng in the almost dark was watching him. He took his eyes from her and looked down her body to his hand. It had stopped moving some vague time ago, slipped into slumber of its own accord. Were her eyes open now or closed? He leaned forward to see and overbalanced. They fell asleep with their lips touching, not yet having kissed at all.

 

The pre-Nova ancient Plato tells of the earliest human, a quadruped with two sexes. And one terrible night in a storm engendered by the forces of evil, all the humans were torn in two; and ever since, each has sought the other half of itself. Any two of opposite sexes can make something, but it is usually incomplete in some way. But when one part finds its true other half, no power on earth can keep them apart, nor drive them apart once they join. This happened that night, beginning at some moment so deep in sleep that neither could ever remember it. What happened to each was all the way into new places where nothing had ever been before, and it was forever. The essence of such a thing is acceptance, and lest he be judged, Charli Bux ceased to judge quite so much and began to learn something of the ways of life around him. Life around him certainly concealed very little. The chil­dren slept where they chose. Their sexual play was cer­tainly no more enthusiastic or more frequent than any other kind of play-and no more concealed. There was very much less talk about sex than he had ever encountered in any group of any age. He kept on working hard, but no longer to conceal facts from himself. He saw a good many things he had not permitted himself to see before, and found to his surprise that they were not, after all, the end of the world.

 

He had one more very, very bad time coming to him. He sometimes slept in Tyng’s room, she sometimes in his. Early one morning he awoke alone, recalling some elusive part of the work, and got up and padded down to her room. He realized when it was too late to ignore it what the soft singing sound meant; it was very much later that he was able to realize his fury at the discovery that this special song was not his alone to evoke. He was in her room before he could stop himself, and out again, shak­ing and blind.

 

He was sitting on the wet earth in the green hollow under a willow when Vorhidin found him. (He never knew how Vorhidin had accomplished this, nor for that matter how he had come there himself.) He was staring straight ahead and had been doing so for so long that his eyeballs were dry and the agony was enjoyable. He had forced his fingers so hard down into the ground that they were buried to the wrists. Three nails were bent and bro­ken over backwards and he was still pushing.

 

Vorhidin did not speak at all at first, but merely sat down beside him. He waited what he felt was long enough and then softly called the young man’s name. Charli did not move. Vorhidin then put a hand on his shoulder and the result was extraordinary. Charli Bux moved nothing visibly but the cords of his throat and his jaw, but at the first touch of the Vexveltian’s hand he threw up. It was what is called clinically “projectile” vom­iting. Soaked and spattered from hips to feet, dry-eyed and staring, Charli sat still. Vorhidin, who understood what had happened and may even have expected it, also remained just as he was, a hand on the young man’s shoul­der. “Say the words!” he snapped.

 

Charli Bux swiveled his head to look at the big man. He screwed up his eyes and bunked them, and blinked again.

 

He spat sour out of his mouth, and his lips twisted and trembled. “Say the words,” said Vorhidin quietly but forcefully, because he knew Charli could not contain them but had vomited rather than enunciate them. “Say the words.”

 

“Y-y-” Charli had to spit again. “You,” he croaked. “You-her father!” he screamed, and in a split second he became a dervish, a windmill, a double flail, a howling wolverine. The loamy hands, blood-muddy, so lacked control from the excess of fury that they never became fists. Vorhidin crouched where he was and took it all. He did not attempt to defend himself beyond an occasional small accurate movement of the head, to protect his eyes. He could heal from almost anything the blows might do, but unless the blows were spent, Charli Bux might never heal at all. It went on for a long time because something in Charli would not show, probably would not even feel, fatigue. When the last of the resources was gone, the col­lapse was sudden and total. Vorhidin knelt grunting, got painfully to his feet, bent dripping blood over the unconscious Terran, lifted him in his arms, and carried him gently into the house.

 

Vorhidin explained it all, in time. It took a great deal of time, because Charli could accept nothing at all from any­one at first, and then nothing from Vorhidin, and after that, only small doses. Summarized from half a hundred conversations, this is the gist:

 

“Some unknown ancient once wrote,” said Vorhidin, “‘Tain’t what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you do know that ain’t so.’ Answer me some questions. Don’t stop to think. (Now that’s silly. Nobody off Vexvelt ever stops to think about incest. They’ll say a lot, mind you, and fast, but they don’t think.) I’ll ask, you answer. How many bisexual species-birds, beasts, fish and in­sects included-how many show any sign of the incest taboo?”

 

“I really couldn’t say. I don’t recall reading about it, but then, who’d write such a thing? I’d say-quite a few. It would be only natural.”

 

“Wrong. Wrong twice, as a matter of fact. Homo sa­piens has the patent, Charli-all over the wall-to-wall uni­verse, only mankind. Wrong the second: it would not be natural. It never was, it isn’t, and it never will be natural.”

 

“Matter of terms, isn’t it? I’d call it natural. I mean, it comes naturally. It doesn’t have to be learned.”

 

“Wrong. It does have to be learned. I can document that, but that’ll wait-you can go through the library later. Accept the point for the argument.”

 

“For the argument, then.”

 

“Thanks. What percentage of people do you think have sexual feelings about their siblings-brothers and sisters?”

 

“What age are you talking about?”

 

“Doesn’t matter.”

 

“Sexual feelings don’t begin until a certain age, do they?”

 

“Don’t they? What would you say the age is, on the average?”

 

“Oh-depends on the indi-but you did say ‘average,’ didn’t you? Let’s put it around eight. Nine maybe.”

 

“Wrong. Wait till you have some of your own, you’ll find out. I’d put it at two or three minutes. I’d be willing to bet it existed a whole lot before that, too. By some weeks.”

 

“I don’t believe it!”

 

“I know you don’t,” said Vorhidin. “‘Strue all the same. What about the parent of the opposite sex?”

 

“Now, that would have to wait for a stage of conscious­ness capable of knowing the difference.”

 

“Wel-l-l-you’re not as wrong as usual,” he said, but he said it kindly. “But you’d be amazed at how early that can be. They can smell the difference long before they can see it. A few days, a week.”

 

“I never knew.”

 

“I don’t doubt that a bit. Now, let’s forget everything you’ve seen here. Let’s pretend you’re back on Lethe and I ask you, what would be the effects on a culture if each individual had immediate and welcome access to all the others?”

 

“Sexual access?” Charli made a laugh, a nervous sort of sound. “Sexual excess, I’d call it.”

 

“There’s no such thing,” said the big man flatly. “Depending on who you are and what sex, you can do it only until you can’t do it any more, or you can keep on until finally nothing happens. One man might get along beau­tifully with some mild kind of sexual relief twice a month or less. Another might normally look for it eight, nine times a day.”

 

“I’d hardly call that normal”

 

“I would. Unusual it might be, but it’s one hundred percent normal for the guy who has it, long as it isn’t pathological. By which I mean, capacity is capacity, by the cupful, by the horsepower, by the flight ceiling. Man or machine, you do no harm by operating within the parameters of design. What does do harm-lots of it, and some of the worst kind-is guilt and a sense of sin, where the sin turns out to be some sort of natural appetite. I’ve read case histories of boys who have suicided because of a nocturnal emission, or because they yielded to the temptation to masturbate after five, six weeks of self-denial-a denial, of course, that all by itself makes them preoccu­pied, absolutely obsessed by something that should have no more importance than clearing the throat, (I wish I could say that this kind of horror story lives only in the ancient scripts, but on many a world right this minute, it still goes on.)

 

“This guilt and sin thing is easier for some people to understand if you take it outside the area of sex. There are some religious orthodoxies which require a very specific diet, and the absolute exclusion of certain items. Given enough indoctrination for long enough, you can keep a man eating only (well say) ‘flim’ while ‘flam’ is forbid­den. He’ll get along on thin moldy flim and live half starved in a whole warehouse full of nice fresh flam. You can make him ill - even kill him, if you have the knack - just by convincing him that the flim he just ate was really flam in disguise. Or you can drive him psychotic by slip­ping him suggestions until he acquires a real taste for flam and gets a supply and hides it and nibbles at it se­cretly every time he fights temptation and loses.

 

“So imagine the power of guilt when it isn’t a flim-and-flam kind of manufactured orthodoxy you’re violating, but a deep pressure down in the cells somewhere. It’s as mad, and as dangerous, as grafting in an ethical-guilt structure which forbids or inhibits yielding to the need for the B-vitamin complex or potassium.”

 

“Oh, but,” Charli interrupted, “now you’re talking about vital necessities-survival factors.”

 

“I sure as hell am,” said Vorhidin in Charli’s own idiom, and grinned a swift and hilarious-and very accurate-imitation of Charli’s flash-beacon smile. “Now it’s time to trot out some of the things I mentioned before, things that can hurt you much more than ignorance-the things you know that ain’t so.” He laughed suddenly. “This is kind of fun, you know? I’ve been to a lot of worlds, and some are miles and years different from others in a thou­sand ways: but this thing I’m about to demonstrate, this particular shut-the-eyes, shut-the-brains conversation you can get anywhere you go. Are you ready? Tell me, then: what’s wrong with incest? I take it back-you know me. Don’t tell me. Tell some stranger, some fume-sniffer or alcohol addict in a spaceport bar.” He put out both hands, the fingers so shaped that one could all but see light glisten from the imaginary glass he held. He said in a slurred voice, “Shay, shtranger, whut’s a-wrong wit’ in-shest, km?” He closed one eye and rolled the other toward Charli.

 

Charli stopped to think. “You mean, morally, or what?”

 

“Let’s skip that whole segment. Right and wrong de­pend on too many things from one place to another, al­though I have some theories of my own. No-let’s be sitting in this bar and agree that incest is just awful, and go on from there. What’s really wrong with it?”

 

“You breed too close, you get faulty offspring. Idiots and dead babies without heads and all that.”

 

“I knew it! I knew it!” crowed the big Vexveltian. “Isn’t it wonderful? From the rocky depths of a Stone Age cul­ture through the brocades and knee-breeches sort of grand opera civilizations all the way out to the computer technocracies, where they graft electrodes into their heads and shunt their thinking into a box-you ask that question and you get that answer. It’s something every­body just knows. You don’t have to look at the evidence.”

 

“Where do you go for evidence?”

 

“To dinner, for one place, where you’ll eat idiot pig or feeble-minded cow. Any livestock breeder will tell you that, once you have a strain you want to keep and de­velop, you breed father to daughter and to grand-daughter, and then brother to sister. You keep that up indefinitely until the desirable trait shows up recessive, and you stop it there. But it might never show up reces­sive. In any case, it’s rare indeed when anything goes wrong in the very first generation; but you in the bar, there, you’re totally convinced that it will. And are you prepared to say that every mental retard is the product of an incestuous union? You’d better not, or you’ll hurt the feelings of some pretty nice people. That’s a tragedy that can happen to anybody, and I doubt there’s any more chance of it between related parents than there is with anyone else.

 

“But you still don’t see the funniest ... or maybe it’s just the oddest part of that thing you know that just ain’t so. Sex is a pretty popular topic on most worlds. Almost every aspect of it that is ever mentioned has nothing to do with procreation. For every mention of pregnancy or childbirth, I’d say there are hundreds which deal only with the sex act itself. But mention incest, and the re­sponse always deals with offspring. Always! To consider and discuss a pleasure or love relationship between blood relatives, you’ve apparently got to make some sort of spe­cial mental effort that nobody, anywhere, seems able to do easily-some not at all.”

 

“I have to admit I never made it. But then-what is wrong with incest, with or without pregnancy?”

 

“Aside from moral considerations, you mean. The moral consideration is that it’s a horrifying thought, and it’s a horrifying thought because it always has been. Biologi­cally speaking, I’d say there’s nothing wrong with it. Nothing. I’d go even further, with Dr. Phelvelt-ever hear of him?”

 

“I don’t think so.”

 

“He was a biological theorist who could get one of his books banned on worlds that had never censored any­thing before-even on worlds which had science and freedom of research and freedom of speech as the abso­lute keystones of their whole structure. Anyway, Phelvelt had a very special kind of mind, always ready to take the next step no matter where it is, without insisting that it’s somewhere where it isn’t. He thought well, he wrote well, and he had a vast amount of knowledge outside his specialty and a real knack for unearthing what he hap­pened not to know. And he called that sexual tension be­tween blood relatives a survival factor.”

 

“How did he come to that?”

 

“By a lot of separate paths which came together in the same place. Everybody knows (this one is sol) that there are evolutionary pressures which make for changes in a species. Not much (before Phelvelt) had been written about stabilizing forces. But don’t you see, inbreeding is one of them?”

 

“Not offhand, I don’t.”

 

“Well, look at it, man! Take a herd animal as a good example. The bull covers his cows, and when they deliver heifers and the heifers grow up, he covers them too. Sometimes there’s a third and even fourth generation of them before he gets displaced by a younger bull. And all that while, the herd characteristics are purified and rein­forced. You don’t easily get animals with slightly differ­ent metabolisms which might tend to wander away from the feeding ground the others were using. You won’t get high-bottom cows which would necessitate Himself bringing something to stand on when he came courting.” Through Charli’s shout of laughter he continued, “So there you have it-stabilization, purification, greater sur­vival value-all resulting from the pressure to breed in.”

 

“I see, I see. And the same thing would be true of lions or fish or tree toads, or-”

 

“Or any animal. A lot of things have been said about Nature, that she’s implacable, cruel, wasteful and so on. I like to think she’s-reasonable. I concede that she reaches that state cruelly, at times, and wastefully and all the rest. But she has a way of coming up with the pragmatic solu­tion, the one that works. To build in a pressure which tends to standardize and purify a successful stage, and to call in the exogene, the infusion of fresh blood, only once in several generations-that seems to me most rea­sonable.”

 

“More so,” Charli said, “than what we’ve always done, when you look at it that way. Every generation a new ex­ogene, the blood kept churned up, each new organism full of pressures which haven’t had a chance with the environment.”

 

“I suppose,” said Vorhidin, “you could argue that the incest taboo is responsible for the restlessness that pulled mankind out of the caves, but that’s a little too simplistic for me. I’d have preferred a mankind that moved a little more slowly, a little more certainly, and never fell back. I think the ritual exogamy that made inbreeding a crime and ‘deceased wife’s sister’ a law against incest is responsible for another kind of restlessness.”

 

He grew very serious. “There’s a theory that certain normal habit patterns should be allowed to run their course. Take the sucking reflex, for example. It has been said that infants who have been weaned too early plague themselves all their lives with oral activity-chewing on straws, smoking intoxicants in pipes, drinking out of bot­tle by preference, nervously manipulating the lips, and so on. With that as an analogy, you may look again at the restlessness of mankind all through his history. Who but a gaggle of frustrates, never in their lives permitted all the ways of love within the family, could coin such a concept as ‘motherland’ and give their lives to it and for it? There’s a great urge to love Father, and another to topple him. Hasn’t humanity set up its beloved Fathers, its Big Brothers, loved and worshiped and given and died for them, rebelled and killed and replaced them? A lot of them richly deserved it, I concede, but it would have been better to have done it on its own merits and not because they were nudged by a deep-down, absolutely sex­ual tide of which they could not speak because they had learned that it was unspeakable.

 

“The same sort of currents flow within the family unit. So-called sibling rivalry is too well known to be described, and the frequency of bitter quarreling between siblings is, in most cultures and their literature, a sort of cliché. Only a very few psychologists have dared to put forward the obvious explanation that, more often than not, these frictions are inverted love feelings, well salted with horror and guilt. It’s a pattern that makes conflict between sib­lings all but a certainty, and it’s a problem which, once stated, describes its own solution. . . . Have you ever read Vexworth? No? You should-I think you’d find him fascinating. Ecologist; in his way quite as much of a giant as Phelvelt.”

 

“Ecologist-that has something to do with life and en­vironment, right?”

 

“Ecology has everything to do with life and environ­ment; it studies them as reciprocals, as interacting and mutually controlling forces. It goes without saying that the main aim and purpose of any life form is optimum survival; but ‘optimum survival’ is a meaningless term without considering the environment in which it has to happen. As the environment changes, the organism has to change its ways and means, even its basic design. Human beings are notorious for changing their environ­ment, and in most of our history in most places, we have made these changes without ecological considerations. This is disaster, every time. This is overpopulation, past the capabilities of producing food and shelter enough. This is the rape of irreplaceable natural resources. This is the contamination of water supplies. And it is also the twisting and thwarting of psychosexual needs in the emo­tional environment.

 

“Vexvelt was founded by those two, Charli-Phelvelt and Vexworth-and is named for them. As far as I know it is the only culture ever devised on ecological lines. Our sexual patterns derive from the ecological base and are really only a very small part of our structure. Yet for that one aspect of our lives, we are avoided and shunned and pretty much unmentionable.”

 

* * * *

 

It took a long time for Charli to be able to let these ideas in, and longer for him to winnow and absorb them. But all the while he lived surrounded by beauty and fulfill­ment, by people, young and old, who were capable of total concentration on art and learning and building and processing, people who gave to each other and to their land and air and water just a little more than they took. He finished his survey largely because he had started it; for a while he was uncertain of what he would do with it.

 

When at length he came to Vorhidin and said he wanted to stay on Vexvelt, the big man smiled, but he shook his head. “I know you want to, Charli-but do you?”

 

“I don’t know what you mean.” He looked out at the dark bole of one of the Vexveltian poplars; Tyng was there, like a flower, an orchid. “It’s more than that,” said Charli, “more than my wanting to be a Vexveltian. You need me.”

 

“We love you,” Vorhidin said simply. “But-need?”

 

“If I went back,” said Charli Bux, “and Terratu got its hands on my survey, what do you think would become of Vexvelt?”

 

“You tell me.”

 

“First Terratu would come to trade, and then others, and then others; and then they would fight each other, and fight you . . . you need someone here who knows this, really knows it, and who can deal with it when it starts. It will start, you know, even without my survey; sooner or later someone will be able to do what I did-a shipment of feldspar, a sheet of pure metal. They will destroy you.”

 

“They will never come near us.”

 

“You think not. Listen: no matter how the other worlds disapprove, there is one force greater: greed.”

 

“Not in this case, Charli. And this is what I want you to be able to understand, all the way down to your cells. Unless you do, you can never live here. We are shunned, Charli. If you had been born here, that would not matter so much to you. If you throw in your lot with us, it would have to be a total commitment. But you should not make such a decision without understanding how completely you will be excluded from everything else you have ever known.”

 

“What makes you think I don’t know it now?”

 

“You say we need defending. You say other-world trad­ers will exploit us. That only means you don’t under­stand. Charli: listen to me. Go back to Terratu. Make the strongest presentation you can for trade with Vexvelt. See how they react. Then you’ll know-then you can decide.”

 

“And aren’t you afraid I might be right, and because of me, Vexvelt will be robbed and murdered?”

 

And Vorhidin shook his big head, smiling, and said, “Not one bit, Charli Bux. Not one little bit.”

 

So Charli went back, and saw (after a due delay) the Archive Master, and learned what he learned, and came out and looked about him at his home world and through that, at all the worlds like it; and then he went to the se­cret place where the Vexveltian ship was moored, and it opened to him. Tyng was there, Tamba, and Vorhidin. Charli said, “Take me home.”

 

In the last seconds before they took the Drive jump, and he could look through the port at the shining face of Terratu for the last time in his life, Charli said, “Why? Why? How did Human beings come to hate this one thing so much that they would rather die insane and in agony than accept it? How did it happen, Vorhidin?”

 

“I don’t know,” said the Vexveltian.

 

* * * *

 

Afterword:

 

And now you know what sort of a science fiction story this is, and perhaps something about science fiction stories that you didn’t know before.

 

I have always been fascinated by the human mind’s ability to think itself to a truth, and then to take that one step more (truly the basic secret of all human progress) and the inability of so many people to learn the trick. Case in point: “We mean to get that filth off the newsstands and out of the bookstores.” Ask why, and most such crusaders will simply point at the “filth” and wonder that you asked. But a few will take one step more: “Because youngsters might get their hands on it.” That satisfies most, but ask: “And suppose they do?” a still smaller minority will think it through to: “Because it’s bad for them.” Ask again: “In what way is it bad for them?” and a handful can reach this: “It will arouse them.” By now you’ve probably run out of crusaders, but if there are a couple left, ask them, “How does being aroused harm a child?” and if you can get them to take that one more step, they will have to take it out of the area of emotional conviction and into the area of scientific research. Such studies are available, and invariably they show that such arousement is quite harmless—indeed, there is something abnormal about anyone who is not or cannot be so roused. The only possible harm that can result comes not from the sexual response itself but from the guilt-making and punitive attitude of the social environment—most of all that part of it which is doing the crusading.

 

Casting about for some more or less untouched area in which to exercise this one-step-more technique, I hit on this one. That was at least twenty years ago, and I have had to wait until now to find a welcome for anything so unsettling. I am, of course, very grateful. I hope the yarn starts some fruitful argument.

 

What a torturous and plotful genesis! I think, over all, the haunt was my desperate desire to give you the very best I could, as close as possible to your purpose in the anthology, a feeling inflamed by the news I got from Mills at one point that you had been bitterly disappointed by some of the submissions you had received, hence my desire to make up to you other people’s defalcations. All this overlaid on a series of shattering personal experiences which included a pretty complete breakdown on September 4th and a very difficult (though highly successful) rebuilding process afterward. Your story is the first in a long, long time, and as such is especially meaningful to me; I hope it is to you too.

 

Let’s see, that Saturday, the twelfth, was the third day of three days and nights I had been slogging away at it, and at last I had it going the way I wanted to. And it seems I have these good kind friends whom we will call Joe and Selma (because I have the feeling—very strong— that you will meet them one day). And they are close and helpful and admiring (and admired) friends and they were with me all the way in my struggle, and they live in Kingston. When noon (Saturday) came and went they were here running coffee and more or less shouting encouragement, and they said never mind missing the last mail at Woodstock, they’d stick around until it was finished and run it into the central post office in Kingston where it would get off even late Saturday night. Betimes Selma had to leave but Joe stuck around. ‘Long about six Selma called to find out how it was going because now their own affairs were pressing: Joe had to take a bus to Stroudsburg where he would spend a week. He said for her to pack for him, he’d be in in plenty of time. Finally I was done and he grabbed the envelopes (one to Ashmead and one to you) and jumped in his car and beat it. I was so bushed I couldn’t sleep and spent almost the whole night glassy-eyed; when you called the next day I was something like delirious.

 

Comes—what was it, Thursday? I was more normal and biting nails over how much you might have liked or hated the story so called you, to find to my very real horror that you didn’t have it. Events here had been sort of complex as well: my wife has gone to Mexico and I have the four kids to ride herd on. So anyway when I hung up on you I called Ashmead and found he hadn’t gotten the ms. either, and sat there trying to find an alternative to going right out of my mind. I felt a little like the guy in the story talking about what “They” were doing to him. Then I called Selma and told her and she just didn’t believe it. She said she’d call back. She phoned Stroudsburg and asked Joe and Joe was just as horrified. Seems he’d arrived home that Saturday just in time to throw on his traveling suit and be driven to the bus. He thought she mailed it and she thought he mailed it. So where was it?

 

I got into my car and drove to their house and she was in what I can euphemistically call a State. And thank the Lord for that because taking care of her State kept me from going into one of my own. It must have hit us both in the same instant because we practically cracked our heads together jumping up to look in their car, and there were the effing envelopes, with all the red and white hurry-up stickers all over them, slid down between the right front seat back and thence under the seat. I can even reconstruct their exact trajectory. Joe’s big and long-legged and Selma’s a little bit of a thing, and that Saturday night he ran out of my house with the envelopes and put them on the seat beside him and they slid back. Then when she drove him to the bus she slid the seat forward and down they went underneath. Anyway I made her promise not to commit suicide until after she talked to me again and then maybe we’d do it together, and scooted back to Woodstock where I knew I’d catch an outgoing mail.

 

All of which, being the truth, is too incredible for anyone’s fiction book, and is not intended for the uses you said you wanted to put some material to in the book. I’m a little hazy about what exactly it was you did say but it was something to the effect that you wanted a bio (oh yes, I recall saying that the very idea gives me amnesia) and some words about the circumstances that produced the story. All right, I’ll try to do both: see attached.

 

Anyway, Harlan, whether or not you like the story I’m glad you asked me and I’m glad I did it. It broke a lot of kinds of ice. I’m back at my Playboy story and will at long last be firing yarns at them regularly. I’ve reread the story twice and once thought it was dreadful and once thought it was wonderful. It has a kind of structure I’ve never used before; usually I employ one “angle” character who alone thinks and feels and remembers, and with whom the reader identifies, while everyone else acts angry or says sorrowful things or has no memories unless he says them aloud. But in this one I (more or less) stayed in the minds of minor characters and watched the protagonist through their eyes. Also that trick of self-interruption in italics is one I shall polish and perfect and use again...What I’m trying to say is that you put the tools back in my hands they feel very good. So thanks. Even if you don’t like it. If that’s the case I’ll give you back your advance. I’m working again and can say that and mean it.

 

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