A Voyage To Dari

by Ian Wallace

  A fortyish woman frowningly interposed, “Sir, I see your point, but can’t we get on with the next phase earlier than a generation away? Once we have revitalized their culture, can’t we spark them into new things?”

  “I’m not sure,” he answered. “And I think we must all be unsure. It is perfectly possible that the Darian culture prior to the Moudjinn incursion was the maturity of Darian culture. Let us just for a moment assume that this was the case: it was a good rich maturity, any one of us would admire it if he fully understood it. From time to time a Darian, viewing afar the Moudjinnian culture, concluded that he wished to embrace its hard vigor; and in many cases he did so, and some of these people ended by being totally competent Moudjinn-Westerners. Now, miss, I ask you: why should not Dari be left to pursue her own culture, while being invited to pursue also the Western-type cultures? What I am saying is this: if the West offers blandishments for some Darians, does it follow that the West—Moudjinn or Sol or any other West—has to be imposed on all Darians?”

  They were all watching him closely. There was an intuitive flash, and he smiled at his questioner, asserting, “Miss, I think you have just put my lecture into my mouth. Tighten belts, crew!” And he went into it, ad lib—if impromptu words out of background and thought can be called ad lib.

  “As you know, Dari is an ocean-covered world having no great landmasses but many archipelagoes with innumerable foliaceous islands. Dari has everywhere a homogeneously benign climate for three reasons: it is close to its wanning star, its polar axis is not inclined with respect to its star, and its atmosphere is thickest at its equator and thinnest at its poles so as to equalize temperature everywhere. This uniform benignity of climate contributes, I imagine, to Dari’s uniform benignity of morals—except where this benignity has been tainted by Moudjinnian incursion. Darians uniformly operate according to a simple lore that varies little from one archipelago to another. This lore says in essence that all behaviors are good behaviors as long as they follow the easy rules and create no long-range sadness. And all is done to music.

  “Unhappily, this very old easy culture has been demoralized by several centuries of Moudjinnian domination. You must appreciate the full extent of this demoralization. The Moudjinn came into Dari in the first instance for a humanly obvious reason: Dari was their neighboring planet, and Dari had human life. They had not been on Dari long before they began to discover that Dari had also, in its planet-wide subtropical climate, remarkable natural organic resources. But as an interesting landmark in human exploitation history, the Moudjinn did not milk these resources to the point of destruction. The several exploiting corporations jointly examined into the question of perpetuation, and they mutually concluded that their mutual long-range corporate welfare depended on keeping Dari’s nature substantially as they had found it, perhaps improved a bit. And this has been done. But we must note that the Darians were practically enslaved, by exploitive labor and welfare practices, into the process of natural conservation.

  “And there was a lot more to it. In Djinn Galaxy, Moudjinn subsequently found a number more life-bearing planets; but most of them bear only vegetable life, and no other planet bears highly intelligent life. Almost all of these planets are tropical or subtropical in the life-bearing areas. Moudjinn quickly discovered that Darians, by climatic habitude and quite probably by genetic mutation, were more able to sustain these climates under labor conditions than any Moudjinnian. Consequently Moudjinn has followed to conjoint practices on Dari: human fertility stimulation, and human exportation for extraplanetary labor.

  “To stimulate fertility, Moudjinn went the crafty way of undermining symbolic ritual, an approach which in the same undermining ruined clan consciousness. This is worth taking two minutes to explain.” Djeel was now very tense.

  “From primeval times, Darian youth have practiced amorous freedom, while at the same time placing high ritual value on female virginity. There is no real conflict here, if you accept the idea that virginity is symbolic rather than anatomic; nevertheless, the symbolical virginity must be for a Darian symbolically anatomical.

  “At the time of a marriage, it was requisite that the clan chief sanctify the marriage by deflowering the bride. In part, the purpose was to test the bride’s virginity; and an issue of blood was a ritual necessity, although many a bride found it necessary to contrive blood that was not her own.

  “But the major purpose of this intimate testing was far deeper: the intent was that in the course of the testing, the chief would become with the husband co-father of the first child, as a clan blessing on the marriage. And this, as it happens, was no mere superstition; for Darians as a species are triploid, and every child is co-fathered by two spermatozoa. I will give you the technicalities another time; just here I am weaving in on a point of Moudjinnian craftiness.

  “The central relatum to be noticed is that if a chief should refuse to deflower a bride, this bride could not be married; it was an elaborate device for the regulation of marriage . . . and, in the long run, for the regulation of genetics, because illegitimate, children are taboo and used to be slain, while the parents are still disgraced. Hence, unmarried Darian women practice rigorous birth control by a simple method that triploidism facilitates.

  “Well, the point is that the exploiting Moudjinnians found ways to undermine the ritual concept that the chief must deflower a bride, and cleverly they undermined also the credulity of the Darians in their natural contraceptive methods; and with credulity lost, the methods were ruined. Thus the Moudjinnians promoted promiscuous fertility at the cost of a socially unifying ritual. Some of the chief families on Dari, notably the houses of Faleen and of Hanoku, have persistently continued to practice the old ritual as a matter of conservative rebellion, and politically they have suffered by consequence.”

  Djeel had slumped; she was frowning hard down, but meditatively, and not with annoyance. Her head came up as Croyd pressed on with his weaving,

  “Precisely this small rebellion by some of the old houses is an illustration of my conviction that the old meanings of Dari are not dead. They have been smothered by Moudjinn domination and inexplicably violated by pirates among themselves. And yet, when you study the matter, canoe raids on Dari are nothing new; it is spaceship piracy with a feudal undertone that is new and inexplicable.

  “Perhaps after all I must interpolate some thoughts on this piracy. I cannot sufficiently stress that this entire ten-year history is somehow wrong, it is not right, it makes no sense at all. The berserker contexture simply does not arise out of a culture that was tranquil-peaceable in the first place and had been reduced to contented apathy in the second place.

  “It has been as though—now, mark this, because I have pondered alternatives—as though some alien mind had taken psychic possession of zombie Dari, converting its indolence into feudal ferocity experimentally in some enclaves, possibly intending to extend this influence everywhere on the planet. And if this were so, our task on Dari would be hopeless pending discovery and neutralization of the mind.

  “But we must proceed on the assumption that this development is indigenous, that there has been no alien interference other than the Moudjinnian domination. The pirate lords are almost impregnably based on perhaps fifty craggy islands, but there are many thousand serene lowland islands, most of them ruled by resident Moudjinnian governors and garrisons. It is weird that the pirates have made no effort to conquer and free their own planet; instead, like medieval seigneurs, they have been content to enrich themselves individualistically at the expense of Moudjinn and of Sol Galaxy.

  “So, then—bypassing the pirates—what do we do on Dari, having evicted the Moudjinnians? If we were to go into Dari solely with the idea of reconstituting the planet as it was, we would be making no contribution to Darian humanity. Zealous revivals have always everywhere produced fossilization!

  “Do all of you perhaps recall the Socratic-Hegelian concept of thesis-antithesis-synthesis?” Most of them nodded. “All right, you
have heard of the concept, you were taught it in college, and you rote-remembered it; but I am betting that only a few of you have thought through its meaning. So I want to talk now about its meaning, which is essential to our mission on Dari.

  “Hegel proposed that the God mind is all existence, and that all the process of history is a process of ideational development in the mind of God. We can be skeptical of his metaphysics, but his notion powerfully suggests to us a parallel with human individual mental processes— how you and I go about wrestling out conflicts of ideas-within our own minds. For a long time we are comfortable with a thesis: an old setted idea. Then a new idea—an antithesis—arises within us to challenge the thesis, and we are in conflict between the two. Sometimes either the old thesis or the new antithesis wins the conflict absolutely, the other is dead. And in most cases this kind of either-or conflict is not progress, it is merely change. But if we are creative, in time out of the conflict there may arise a new synthesis, which includes and reinvigorates the old and the new; and on the synthesis we move ahead. Of course, the new synthesis, once established, becomes a new thesis; and in time a stilll-more-advanced antithesis may arise to challenge it, and the process goes on ad infinitum—Hegel supposed that it would end in perfection, but Dewey countered six centuries ago that he saw no reason to expect an end.

  “Let me now apply this concept to our mission on Dari.

  “The thesis on Dari is the old culture, its structure and meaning. The antithesis is the invasion by the Moudjinnian culture—which is much like Sol Galaxy’s West, except that on Moudjinn the culture situation is a blend of Erth’s thirteenth-century feudal politics with Erth’s nineteenth-century laissez-faire economics at a modern technological power level. And the resulting conflict has produced planetary demoralization on Dari; the planet is like a traumatically troubled mind that has quit fighting because of its confusion and has resigned itself passively to the flow of events that traumatize its own genius.

  “But we are coming in new, sympathetic to Dari, aesthetically appreciative of Dari. Our task is to make Dari competitive in her world, without forever ruining Dari’s culture meaning. What we are therefore to produce on Dari, with Darian cooperation, is a new synthesis. We must encourage—not require, but encourage—the best, strongest, richest components of the old Darian thesis to rejuvenate themselves and mate with the Western antithesis; and out of this, if we do our job well, will emerge of its own power a Dari of self-originating and self-sustaining pride.

  “Let us first of all help Dari, as an automomous planet, become again what Dari was before the Moudjinnians came in. And that was beautiful; and if we can succeed in stimulating them to resurrect it, I hope it may never again die. But at the same time, from afar let us offer without pressure the stimuli of the West; and if some of them want to react positively, let us facilitate this. Meanwhile, can we perhaps develop cooperatively and sympathetically with the Darians a new structure that will help them to preserve eternal their culture—against any and all incursions whatsoever, and in competitive competition with all other cultures—while leaving opportunity for energetic individuals to go out of Dari and embrace the West? I say that Dari the way it was was vulnerable, and it is languishing of this vulnerability; I propose that Dari can be the way it was without this vulnerability, with mechanisms for resistance, and yet can leave the way open for its Faustian young to try other things . . . ”

  He stopped, feeling that perhaps he had ballooned a bit.

  I arose. “Governor, you told me to inform you when it would be 1600 hours. It is 1602.”

  Croyd flashed a grin. “Overtime! End of lecture.”

  The standing applause disconcerted him profoundly.

  “You may even turn out to be our Kalki redeemer.”

  For a long time their eyes were engaged. She had said what he would like to be—not for self-glorification, but for Dari; Croyd understood very well about hybris.

  Her hand withdrew itself. He was faintly puzzled by his inward response to her touch, having cortically turned himself off for the duration of the voyage, which had another four days to go. He commented, “No member of my staff is a Darian or has Dari experience; in Sol Galaxy, such people are practically unfindable. I hope you are going to stay with us.”

  “Does it matter, sir, since you obviously have Dari experience?”

  “What I know about Dari is secondhand, from Moudjinn Imperial Library flakes brought back by the Sol fleet admiral who talked the Emperor into negotiating for treaty. I have no Dari experience. Therefore it very greatly matters that I have with me the princess who is the only surviving noble in the highest house of Dari.”

  Her eyes clouded. “My father and mother and brothers died, not of war, but of degenerative disease. I . . . ran away from my Dari. I availed myself of a Moudjinn university scholarship. After three years of study, I blew that and shipped as captain’s woman aboard a Darian Erth pirate. We were captured off Vega and brought to Erth. All of us were treated humanely; they gave us useful work. I have been four years with Interplanesco. Recently I read about the Djinn treaty and the provisions about my Dari. I found my way to President Tannen. Here I am . . . ”

  She looked swiftly up at Croyd’s cryptic face. “Don’t be concerned, sir; this will not be an embarrassment for the governor. It might have been, but I have listened to you, and it will not be. You are bringing new ideas to Dari; but they are Darian-type ideas, the sorts of absorbable ideas that a solid-sympathetic Darian leader might bring back with him were he to venture abroad. On Dari I plan to reassert my hereditary position, to apologize for my running away, and to support the new governor, because I believe in him, because incredibly he knows so much about my Dari, including the recent history and the Dari meaning of the homes of Faleen and Hanoku. And sometimes I plan to steal into his presence and offer private guidance, how some brave and mostly Darian idea of his may err by being subliminally counter-Darian, how perhaps a slight modification can bring it into robust sunlight . . . ”

  She broke off. She transformed her face with a smile. “Governor Croyd, sir, I am not making good dinner conversation. Better you should make again with the Moskovian.”

  I murmured, “Too long already you’ve known me, Princess.”

  Childe Roland tensed: this would be it.

  Then I challenged, “Gorsky, how about giving him something really tough to translate?”

  After a moment of reflection, the admiral challenged: “Try this, Croyd. ‘Alyosha, look straight at me! Of course I am just such a little boy as you are, only not a novice. And what have Moskovian boys been doing up till now, some of them, I mean? In this stinking tavern, for instance here, they meet and sit down in a corner. They’ve never met in their lives before, and when they go out of the tavern, they won’t meet again for forty years. And what do they talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern? Of the eternal questions, of the existence of God and immortality. And those who do not believe in God talk of socialism or anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same, they’re the same questions turned inside out. And masses, masses of the most original Moskovian boys do nothing but talk of the eternal questions! Isn’t it so?’ ” Gorsky trap-shut her mouth and waited.

  Both Croyd and I were staring at the admiral (while Djeel gazed at Croyd). Softly Croyd said, “Gorsky, I’ve known you for a decade, but I had no hint that yours is a soul rich enough to memorize Dostoyevsky!”

  Gorsky cleared her throat and uttered in hoarse embarrassment, “Then already you recognize it as Dostoyevsky?”

  “ ‘Alyosha’ tipped me instantly, and the swing of it confirmed. Now, wait, let me be sure I recall the entire web of Moskovian sounds . . . He concentrated for a moment, then nodded. “All right, I have it.”

  “The translation?”

  “Not yet—only the sound web as yet. Admiral, maybe you’d be good enough to refill Djeel’s wineglass and mine, while I go to work on this.”

&n
bsp; Six eyes were bent upon him. His eyes were closed. Then Djeel saw his brows go up a little, and then his eyes closed tighter, and his brows went down, and his frown was intense. He opened his eyes, glanced about him, reached for the wine, drank half, and closed his eyes again.

  We were painfully tense; we did not know why.

  Suddenly the face of Croyd went serene, and he opened his eyes and smiled broadly. “I’m humiliated,” he announced, “but I have to drop this—I just remembered a thing that I absolutely have to think through within the next hour. Chairman Groen has got to have my prompt reply by iradiogram. You will excuse me, won’t you? Princess”—he bent over her, squeezing a small shoulder—“this has been most pleasant. I want to know you better as we go on working together. Admiral Gorsky . . . President Tannen . . .” Bowing slightly to each of us, he departed the dining salon.

  We stared after him. Half-automaticaily, Djeel left her chair and moved a few paces toward the door wherethrough he had departed; she stood there, alert, looking at where he was not.

  I caught Gorsky’s eyes; my brows went up a trifle; her eyes narrowed. Croyd was covering something; he should have come up with the translation at least a minute before his abrupt departure. I shrugged, and undressing a cigar, considered little Djeel at a little distance in semirear profile. I mused, “Eighty, fifty-eight, eighty-three.”

  “You look at her,” remarked Gorsky, “but you seem to speak of me.”

  “I mean centimeters. To get inches, divide by two-point-five.”

  “That,” Gorsky asserted, “was not the translation.”

  Alone in his cabin, Croyd sat and composed himself to appraise himself; if his language perception had unaccountably failed, what else might be failing?