The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  However, there is some time before we get to Pistach-home. We have other worlds to visit first. The subjective time lapse from Earth to the first one, Flibotsia, is about two of your days, and you will sleep during all of it. If we could not travel in the null-time dimension, it would take thousands of your years to reach any of our near worlds, but the drive allows us to stand teetering upon a point of time as we plunge onward in several dimensions of space. Indeed, some of the new drives are virtually instantaneous. One begins here, gets in the ship, has a cup of tea, gets out of the ship, and behold, one is there. Poof. Even so, we are far from the intergalactic drive our religion posits as the next necessary step in the evolution of intelligence! Between the galaxies, so our scientists think, the umquah are more evenly spread and less irritable than where matter annoys them constantly.

  When we arrive on Pistach-home, I know you will enjoy seeing the House of the Fresco. Oh, I wish it were less obscured by soot, so you could see it as it was when first painted. Though perhaps you would be disappointed. I have seen the Sistine Chapel. I have seen the caves at Lescaux. Your people have an inborn artistry of very high degree. It may be our Fresco would not have impressed you, even when it was new. The Inkleozese agree that this is probable. They, too, deeply admire the artistry of your race.

  We must rest now. When we have rested, Vess and I must argue yet again. We have been arguing about Earth for a very long time, now. There is so much to do, and I want to do it all at once while Vess counsels caution, a little at a time. It was I who insisted upon the Ugliness Plague. “An immediate lesson,” I cried. Even Vess agrees it is working, though many of the women are simply leaving the countries that mistreated them. Whether they do or not is up to them, the men cannot harm them. The important issue, the question of purity versus lust, is for the first time being put into its proper context. Some of the men prefer to continue in the old mold, of course, by trying to kidnap women from neighboring countries, but that won’t work. As soon as a man with that attitude touches a woman, she becomes a hag, though only to others. Her mirror continues to show her real self.

  We have also scheduled a lengthy time for discussion about your prisons, which preoccupy your people to an abnormal extent. Unfortunately, your penal system is based on religious notions of penitence and reformation, character emendations which can be evoked only where a sense of shame is present. In a society as mobile as your own, many people are totally anonymous to those around them. They do not care what they do before strangers or to strangers. If one feels no shame, punishment only angers. If one feels shame, punishment is almost unnecessary.

  Logically, therefore, your prisons should seek to instill shame, but even if it were possible, it would offend your civil libertarians to do so. “Shaming” others is considered an affront to their dignity. Since shame is essential to remorse, which is the natural punishment for misbehavior—just as gut cramps are the natural punishment for eating unripe thrags—if one cannot evoke shame, then forget about penitence or reformation. It won’t happen.

  In the place of shame you have substituted a meaningless phrase, “Paying one’s debt to society.” You send a rapist or murderer to prison for a few years, and then you say he has “paid his debt to society.” Of course, he has done no such thing. A term in prison pays for nothing, not if it is for ten years or twenty or fifty! The victim or victims are still violated or dead, and to say that the evildoer has paid his debt is to denigrate the value of the victim! This, in turn, causes anger among the victim’s family or friends, who wonder why a beloved wife is worth five years while someone else’s daughter is worth twice that. This, in turn, causes disrespect for the law. As Canthorel has written, “If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law.”

  Vess is astonished that Earthians define as cruel and unusual many acts that are not unusual and not particularly cruel. Breeding madness is cruel, breeding madness is unusual. Most of your men don’t have it. Most of your men wouldn’t want it. Castration would remove it from those who have it. What is cruel about that? Is the inceptive organ really more important than the mind? Vess and I find this an extremely exotic notion. In your great documents of national purpose, the right to pursue satisfactions in one’s own life is asserted, but not at others’ expense. People who misuse the lives of others should not be allowed to repeat the act, but your peculiar ideas about cruelty allow it, time and again.

  One of the programs we left to start without us, back on Earth, is the rewording of your newspapers and TV shows. They will no longer be able to use empty language, like “paid his debt to society,” or “claimed responsibility” for an act of terrorism. Instead, they must use true words. “He has been sentenced to prison for ten years which will do nothing to ameliorate his urges to molest and mutilate little girls.” Or, “The XX faction has asserted that it committed the cowardly atrocity of killing a busload of schoolchildren.” Earthians must learn to say truly what has happened and not cover it with easy-speak.

  Earthians, or perhaps only Americans, must also realize that some persons cannot be fixed, that nurture can go only so far in changing what people are born to be. Some people are born dangerous. We have a saying, we Pistach: “Some pfiggy can’t breed, some pfluggi can’t bite, some flosti can’t fly, some Pistach are glusi.” Pfiggi are small and numerous, Pfluggi are larger and have sharp teeth. Both live in swamps. In essence, the saying means that we must accept the reality of persons, not what they should be or we wish they were, but what they are. Someone may be born of humans and look like a human without having humanity. Someone may be born of kind parents and raised with kindness and be unkind, just as someone may be born crippled or dwarfed to people who are neither. The biological body may not manifest the psychological quality of humanity, and if it does not, it is not human. We Pistach know what it takes to mend people, and it takes a good deal more than you are willing to do.

  Vess and I will also talk about your reproductive habits. Your people have learned a great deal about the subject, but you have applied little sense to it, even yet. Now you are begetting children scientifically, and great law courts grind to stillness on the issues of who owns the resultant child. Is it the donor of sperm or the donor of egg; is it the womb that bears, the person who paid, the doctor who was instrumental, the legal wife of the sperm donor, the legal husband of the egg donor, the legal husband of the womb, the legitimate previous children of the womb, the mate of the person who paid, the person who signed the contract?

  We have another saying, “Those who cause, pay.” It is a simple rule, but it has been very, very effective in bringing order to our lives. If a physician helps a woman bear eight children at once, then that doctor must support seven of them! If your congressmen will not vote to control guns, if your NRA fights against gun control, then your congressmen and the members of the NRA must individually help pay for medical care and wrongful deaths and funeral expenses for every accidental shooting death. We will figure out a way to do this. Vess and I have had several good ideas.

  Oh, Vess and I have much, much to argue about. Your world has so many difficulties to be straightened out, though it is my belief that many of them will submit to simple cures, forcefully applied and diligently monitored. So many little glitches, and yet…as my nootch said of me, long and long ago, we have such hopes for you, dearest Benita, such hopes, dear Chad. Such hopes your people will be another node in the weaving of intelligence among the worlds. When I am arguing with Fluiquosm, when I am listening to ego-wrangles on your TV or in my own Chapter House, when I must consider disorders like those on Assurdo and Quo-Tem, even I sometimes lose sight of what we are truly doing. We are spreading throughout all space and time, weaving a mind to the edges of the galaxy, and in time, in time perhaps throughout the universe. So I remember and keep firmly in my mind when I say, dearest Benita, we have such hopes for you.

  47

  benita

  JOURNEY OUT OF TIME

  Benita woke in a coffinlike cubby hu
ng on the hull of the ship. She was not conscious of time having passed, not even of a night gone by, as she usually was in the morning when she woke. She’d simply lain down and slept and now was awake, without any sense of laterness at all. When she lay down, she was still in a state of speechless surprise about where the ship had been all that time. They had walked into the elevator, and suddenly the back of it opened up like a buttonhole and they slipped through, bag and baggage, into the ship. Chiddy explained that it was coexistent with the entire third floor of the building, wall to wall, and that what Benita had thought of as the lower roof was also the outer integument of the ship.

  Her first thought was Sasquatch. He had committed indecencies on the ship, time after time. Chiddy didn’t mention it or seem concerned, however, so she decided it was not worth mentioning.

  They came aboard, Carlos, thank God, sufficiently impressed to be silent. They drank a glass of something celebratory (and quite likely sedative) with the two Pistach, they lay down in the allocated cubbies. Later, Chiddy told Benita’s cubby to wake her, and also Chad’s, though he let Carlos remain asleep.

  Without asking, Benita knew why Chiddy left Carlos asleep. There was no point in waking him any earlier than needful. She started to go through her usual Carlos litany, all the things she might have done differently, the help she might have sought, the influences she might have brought to bear. If there had been more time. If there had been more money. If she had not been so young. In the current surroundings, however, the litany of self-blame lacked force and conviction. Carlos had been a petulant, screaming, stubborn baby; a whiny little boy; a bully in the playground. He had been a slacker at school. He had never been abused, not even by Bert, in any physical sense. He could be charming, when he thought it would get him something, but most of the time he was not. She decided not to play the game with herself anymore. Mother bears didn’t play such games. They knew their cubs had to go. So, let him go.

  Once awake, Chad and Benita were told they had arrived near Flibotsia, which they admired through a suddenly opened view screen. Chiddy spoke to someone on the ground, and then the ship went down, light as a bubble.

  Chad made himself responsible for the recording equipment. When they stepped outside the ship it was like stepping into a meadow full of huge butterflies that smelled like flowers. Several of them, larger and more brightly colored than the others, approached at once, clustering around Chiddy and Vess to thank them for some event in the past when the Pistach had solved a great problem, or so Benita inferred from the slightly embarrassed expressions on the Pistach faces.

  “What was that about?” asked Benita, during a hiatus while the Flibotsi prepared a festive meal to be laid out, picnic style, in the grassy clearing near the ship.

  “A fertility problem,” said Chiddy. “Those larger beings are empresses of this world, their home world, and some years ago, they were becoming infertile. Vess and I found out why and fixed it for them.”

  “They seemed very grateful,” said Chad.

  Chiddy nodded. “They are. Even though it was more by luck than skill that we figured it out.”

  The banquet was duly provided, tiny containers of various syrups and pastes, to be drunk or spread on sweet crackers or just sniffed, for all of them smelled as marvelous as they tasted. Chiddy whispered that many of them were euphorics, as well. It was, Benita thought, rather like being happily drunk. She felt jolly and joyous, with no thoughts of problems or pains, and also, Chiddy assured her, no need to worry about a possible hangover later.

  When they parted from the Flibotsi with mutual expressions of regard, and while they were on their way to the next stop, Chad asked Chiddy about the fertility problem the two Pistach had solved, and after hemming and humming for a time, Chiddy agreed to tell them about it.

  “The Flibotsi are trisexual, with a few breeding females—the empresses—a few more breeding males—the consorts—and many unsexed ones who do a little work but mostly just enjoy life. When I read your fairy tales of little winged people, I think of the Flibotsi. Of course, as you have seen, they are not small. Indeed they are larger than we, but they are also more fragile, since their planets are low-gravity ones.”

  “I didn’t notice,” said Chad.

  “The ship projected a field around each of us that prevented our doing so,” said Vess. “We weren’t staying long enough for you to acclimate, and we did not wish to run the risk of gastric upset. It would have offended our hostesses.”

  Nodding agreement, Chiddy went on. “The worker Flibotsi are excellent gardeners, and they eat many types of flowers which gives each of them a lovely and quite particular scent. The filaments that grow on their heads and down their backs, their breath, indeed, even their skin smells of flowers, and as you have experienced, being in the midst of a hovering group of Flibotsi is an olfactory delight.

  “We were called in because the empresses were becoming unable to produce male offspring, a certain number of whom are needed to continue the race. Vess and I asked at once if males from some of the other Flibotsi settled worlds couldn’t simply be reassigned to the home world. This would be by far the easiest way to make up the lack, but the empress told us how difficult interstellar travel is for them. It is more than mere dislike of being shut up in close quarters; it amounts almost to terror. Also, they told us, the cost is great. They must pay huge amounts to starship owners whenever they decide to establish a new colony.

  “They have no ships of their own. They do not, as a matter of fact, manufacture many artifacts of any kind, which explains their lack of exchangeable currency. Their entire off-world economy is supported by their trade in botanicals and perfumes. The few artifacts they make include writing implements, of course, as poetry and song are important to them, and musical instruments, mostly stringed ones that are either bowed or plucked, plus drums and chimes. They construct many shrines, small ones, exquisitely made, and they plant gardens and groves everywhere. All this work is done by the unsexed ones, the neuters.

  “Males grow up in the homes of their empress mothers, then are traded to other empresses in the general vicinity when they reach breeding age. Since their aptitudes are more or less the same as those of a registered male poodle on your world, they are pampered and well groomed, and also, for the most part, amusing, affectionate, and capable of sustained sexual activity.

  “All the nonsexual eggs are parthenogenically produced as sterile copies of the empress herself. Both empress and male eggs, however, are fertilized by the male. Following mating flights, during which a supply of sperm is inserted into the empress’s vlasiput, a kind of internal purse or sac, the sperm is very slowly leaked into the oviduct, male eggs being laid at the rate of about one per two hundred sexless ones, and female empress eggs at the rate of one or two per thousand. In the recent past, the rate of male eggs, distinguishable through color and size, had fallen to a level so low that there were some mature empresses who had had no males when they were ready for their maiden flights.

  “The Flibotsi live in flissits, which are built high around the trunks of great trees, roofed with thatch and caulked with fresh moss that takes root on the sides of the structure and soon covers the entire flissit, making it both weather-tight and cushiony. When well sheathed by moss, the flissits completely disappear into the forest scene, small ones for one Flibot, larger ones for two or three or even more, so that nothing intrusive or untidy mars the beauty of the landscape. Though there were a hundred flissits within seeing distance of the glade where we feasted, I doubt that you noticed even one of them, for the Flibotsi have a horror of what I have heard you, Benita, refer to as ‘tackiness.’

  “Very large flissits in giant trees provide apartments for the empresses and their consorts as well as for hatcheries, brooders, and nurseries for the young. The moss covering royal flissits is of a different sort, a paler green, and it grows down the trunk of the tree and then spreads radially, though very slowly, bits of it running off in all directions, like the spokes of
a wheel. It has a strong, pungent, though not unpleasant odor.

  “Vess and I, together with a consultant committee of proffi—scientists, physicians, and the like—set about determining why male eggs were not being laid. The cause was not environmental; the soil and water and air had no poisons in them. We found no inimical radiation, nothing in the food or drink. It wasn’t genetic. It wasn’t the weather or the climate or some new cultural habit that had recently begun. In fact, everything we postulated failed to prove out.

  “When everything else had been exhausted as a possibility, Vess and I decided to go on to our last resort: hanging about and chatting with people. No matter how pleasant, one must put this off, as otherwise one might be misled. Once there is no other recourse, however, one may relax and enjoy it.

  “So we talked to the empresses, who are rather complacent and preoccupied with their sex lives. And to the unsexed ones, who are mostly delightful. And to the male partners, who are the only Flibotsi to demonstrate what you on Earth call angst. We asked all kinds of questions. We chatted with aged brooder and incubator managers, with ancient gardeners, one of whom actually gave us the first clue.

  “ In my day,’ it said, ‘when I was under-gardener to old Flargee at Empress Magh’s, there wasn’t another empress within flying distance. Now, well, now, there’s Empress Irin, Empress Flitch, Empress Moggys, Empress Tryff, Empress (so on and so on, as the gardener listed a dozen or more) all within a bit of a fly, and many close enough to walk to!’

  “This rang a bell with me, and with Vess. Something we had heard or seen or read about. We sat up late that night, in a visitors’ flissit, thinking and chatting, hoping some idea would pop out of the moss walls. In fact, I said at one point, ‘Some idea should pop out of the moss walls,’ and Vess said, ‘That’s it.’”