by Ian Wallace
Foliage moved in a copse.
“Freeze!” warned Vogeler.
“Frozen,” I assented, making sure of my own invisibility.
Avé emerged into the open.
The snake eyes of Vogeler didn’t blink, but his tongue flickered. No mere human could comprehend this woman as the Vogeler-python now comprehended this woman. His man brain flashed him every signal that might be expected, save only warning signals: these are the province of the superego, and Vogeler’s, having ingested the faun-problem, was now off duty. Meanwhile his snake brain added to the sexual signals a special crawling-curling-prowling appreciation of her contours, enriched by the snake’s hyperdeveloped olfactory imagery…
But the woman (who was naked, naturally) did not seem to be enjoying Paradise as Vogeler was enjoying it. Instead, she appeared concerned. Standing tense in the clearing, she kept looking back at the copse, as though some enemy might be following her—yet evidently someone who was not totally enemy: someone about whom she was ambivalent.
My interest sharpened: this woman was in some vague trouble…
Her dear enemy crashed out of the copse into the clear, a noble hairy man, erect in every member. She cowered. He laughed and came on. Then with a leap he overcame her, and they grass-rolled in a snorting screaming comminglement of pain and pleasure…
As it quieted, I was amused to observe that all of Vogeler’s coils had straightened.
Disentangling himself, Edom sat for a while on the grass, legs asprawl, languidly scratching his haired hard belly, while moaning she rolled on her front.
She quieted and lay still.
He looked her way. “Swim?” he inquired in a happy baritone.
She shook her head no.
He reached over and slapped her hard, once on each buttock. “Stay there,” he commanded. “I’ll be back.” Catapulting to his feet, he strode back into the copse, reaching up to snatch a bunch of grapes off a vine as he disappeared.
Still I saw no reason to intervene. I waited, observing.
The woman lay still.
Snake Vogeler slithered over to investigate. He knew that she would not be alarmed, since short pythons don’t attack people; but he didn’t want even to startle her. Approaching her from behind and below, Vogeler was momentarily tempted; but then he decided that she was in no shape to tolerate sensuous exploration, and instead he crept up beside her and flickered his tongue delicately in her ear.
Wearily she brushed it off.
He told her: “It isn’t an ant, it is I.”
She turned her head just enough so that her nose and mouth were no longer buried in grass, and she peered at him with one eye. “Hello, Snake,” she said. “I didn’t know you could talk.” He wasn’t talking, of course: it was mind-to-mind stuff. There was a complication: she didn’t have enough language even to say something as involved as “I didn’t know you could talk.” The potential for semantic complication was there—she was a mutation, fully Homo sapiens sapiens—but she had learned no more than her clan lingo. Her level—and the man’s level—was of the order of: “Swim?”
“No.” “Stay there—I’ll be back.” Even the last was pushing the limit. Vogeler, however, knew that the semantic potential was latent: he had caught her wonder at his talking, and he had given her the words to express it. This conversation was going to be swiftly developmental.
He told her confidentially: “I can talk to you.”
It pleased Ave, and she got up on an elbow and smiled and reached out to stroke Vogeler’s head. He coiled lazily nearer, and her hand descended to caress his throat and back. “Pretty snake,” she murmured. “Smooth. I like.”
If he were to throw coils about her, she might struggle a little but would not seriously resist—not fearing harm, although really too weary for erotics. However, he refrained, allowing himself to be comforted by her stroking hand. He suggested: “Something is wrong. Tell me.”
She frowned a little, continuing to stroke. “He’s wearing me out,” she confessed.
“Why don’t you stop him?”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“But if you could get him to hold off sometimes—”
She shook her head, still frowning. “He’s too big and strong.”
“How about the other women?”
“What other women? I’m his only woman so far.”
“I mean, in the clan. Do the other women have the same trouble?”
She stared stupid, evidently not understanding.
He tried it again. “Do all women have to take what they get from their men—whatever the men want, whenever they want it?”
She grinned: “What other way is there? Snakes must be pretty dumb.”
Vogeler’s mind glanced at mine; I stayed impassive. He returned to Ave: “Does Edom treat you like this all the time?”
“Well, no. Sometimes he lets me alone for days. That’s even worse. When I tell him I want him, he hits me.”
“So it’s only one way for*you—is that it? Either he has all he wants of you, and you have to accept it—or he lets you alone, and when you want him he hits you.”
“That’s it,” she nodded as soon as she had comprehended the long question.
“What else is there between you? Do you play games?”
“What are those?”
“Do you ever just talk?”
“What about?”
“Do you ever—like toss a nut back and forth to each other?”
“Oh, sure. Edom will holler, ’Throw me that nut!’ And then he will crack it with his teeth and eat it.”
“Don’t you even hunt berries together?”
“I hunt berries. He hunts me.”
The fullness of Vogeler’s idea was beginning to enthrall him. He remarked: “It’s hard for me to talk with you at this distance. Do you mind if I gather ’round you, a little?”
She smiled: “I think that would be very nice. You know, you are different from—oof”
“How am I different?” he hissed—telling himself that his interest was not at all carnal: it was more snake-tactual, serpent-thermal; he had to play the role, didn’t he?
“Well,” she replied, “you feel different, of course, but—well, it’s mainly that first you asked.”
“Edom never asks?”
“Never. He just takes. He—ah-ah, no, Snake—please—”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’m nervous, is all. Some other time, when he’s been leaving me alone.”
“What if I just go ahead, whether you like it or not?”
Habitually helpless Avé wasn’t really resisting, she couldn’t resist, she was merely pleading. “Of course I can’t stop you. But—you did ask to come over.”
Sighing a little, Vogeler dropped mostly off, although his top coil continued to drape his head over her shoulder. “Then I will go intellectual,” he told her, “and you must think along with me, while we get your problem solved.”
“Huh?”
“If you pay attention, I can help you with Edom.”
“How?”
“The whole key for you is to get Edom to where he asks—and to where he will take no for an answer. Tell me, Ave—if I teach you how to do this—how will you reward me?”
That one stunned me, a little. Did Operation Second Chance blink at kickbacks?
She dimpled, caressing the middle of the snake body that hung from her shoulder. “If you can teach me that, I will reward you any way you like.”
It was a fascinating response for a naïve, submissive woman who had never been allowed any quid pro quo experience. Inferentially, it was instinctive.
Leaving her entirely, Vogeler went a little way distant and erected his head and front third high off the ground. “Follow me, Ave. There is a tree that I want to show you.”
Invisible, I followed them. Increasingly I was worrying about something semiformless, vast, and ancient.
Vogeler scaled the tree pleasurably, spiraling up the slend
er stem as though he were a stairway on the Loire; and presently his head reappeared to her at the end of two feet of neck, peering down at her from the mesh of branches. Near his head swung appetizing fruit: its color was orange.
“First,” he told her, “you must eat of the fruit of this tree. It is the best fruit you ever tasted.” Carelessly Vogeler discounted the fact that he had no prior knowledge of this fruit: they had put knowledge into him, evidently it was part of his mission.
Doubtfully she gazed upward. “We have always evaded this fruit. It is not to be eaten.”
“How do you know it is not to be eaten?”
“We watch the other animals. We do not do anything that the other animals do not do. That way we show them that we are their brothers and sisters, after all. They do not eat this fruit—so we do not eat this fruit.”
The point was well made, all right, and Vogeler totally grasped its implications. So superior was the brain of Man to the brain of any other animal, that Man’s brain overrode all his instincts at will; and this meant that Man must continually be making decisions. But he looked at other animals, and he saw that they had few decisions to make: they knew. And so, for Man, it was the best part of wisdom to imitate the other animals, to follow their ways…
Man felt inferior, actually! Indeed, when he killed another animal, he felt downright guilty, as though he had murdered his father. Man had magics to neutralize this guilt; but the magics only emphasized the fundamental inferiority.
Vogeler was about to defeat this inferiority; but before he could defeat it, he must join it. If Avé would not eat this fruit without animal authority, why then…
“Some animal must eat it!” Vogeler insisted. “If no animal ate it, how would its seeds be spread?”
“All right, Snake, you tell me. What animal eats it?” Vogeler didn’t know, but Vogeler was crafty. He replied: “The cockatrice eats it.”
“I have never seen a cockatrice eating it. What is a cockatrice?”
“A cockatrice is hard to describe, because it is invisible by day, and at night when it is visible it cannot be seen.”
“Oh.” Ave, hands clasped behind, rocked indecisive on heels and toes.
“Well?” Vogeler demanded. “Are you going to eat it, or not? Do you want me to help you, or not?”
“It will not kill me?”
“No.”
“What will it do to me?”
“It will enlarge your perception.”
“Edom might not like that.”
“He will—because you are to talk him into eating it with you.”
“Will that help me?”
“It will—when the eating is accompanied by the talking that I am going to give you. But you must eat a little of the fruit and enlarge your perception in order to understand the talking. Now listen carefully, Woman. I will nip off the stem: you catch the fruit when it falls. Eat just one bite—no more. Chew it carefully, so that the juice runs down your throat, then swallow it. Then I will tell you what to say to Edom. But before you say these things to Edom, get him to eat some of the fruit. You may take just one more bite in front of him, to convince him that it is good; but after that, give it to him. Then say these things to him. Do you understand?”
“That is all, Snake?”
“That is all.”
’That will help me?”
“Positively.”
“Give me the fruit.”
He snapped with his sharp toothless beak. The fruit fell. She caught it. She hesitated. She bit and began to chew slowly. Her eyes widened. She chewed more rapidly, gazing at the serpent. Slowly she sank to her haunches, and swallowed slowly, and meditated.
Into her enlarging perception Vogeler poured his total store of twentieth-century semantics.
Upon this apperceptive mass he superimposed his prescription for freedom.
I witnessed aghast. Belatedly—beating my mental forehead for stupidity—I had comprehended what Vogeler was up to.
As Avé went predaciously away, as Vogeler slithered down the tree bole to follow her, my mind caught and held him. I was beginning to know what my own mission here had to be.
I demanded of Vogeler: “Are you really stupid enough, or villain enough, to start it all over again?”
The triteness of his innocent “What do you mean?” irritated me as much as the hypocrisy of it. We were mind to mind now, bodies abandoned, locked in a nonspace argument.
I insisted: “It ought to be perfectly clear to you. They sent you here to head off a primeval foul-up in a naïve replay. Instead, you have just refouled the whole future of all mankind on Erth!”
“What makes you think that I have done damage? I played it the way I saw it, where Thoth placed me. I helped the woman.”
“You helped her, Vogeler, with the same old help. And you have just lost them the garden all over again.”
“You mean my conscience ought to be hurting me because I gave them forbidden fruit?”
“Don’t try to evade me with conventional taboo symbolism. Nobody forbade that fruit except man’s own fear of it. I know what it is, Vogeler, I caught the message from you: it is only a stimulant, a natural consciousness-expanding drug: the worst it can do is to make them drunk and leave them with hangovers; it does not have the brain-and gene-mutilating consequences of synthetic concentrates. The thing that counts, Vogeler, is why you are giving them that fruit, what you plan to have them do with it. You have given it so the woman will comprehend the words you have given her; and she will give it to the man so that Edom will be captivated by her suggestions. What counts is your words—and your words are devilish.”
“I fail to see why devilish. The motivation of my words was generous. I was all wrapped up in the woman’s problem. She is enslaved to the man. I cannot stand slavery, Pan. Can you?”
“Well, no—”
“So I taught her how to free herself, using three cantrips.”
“Three, naturally.”
“The first cantrip is not easy to talk about, because it concerns anatomical details with respect to which I have been bred in reticence—that is, not in their use, you understand, but in verbal discussion. And I think that it is probably correct, Pan, to be reticent about such talking, because intellectual discussion breeds an artificially objective attitude as touching matters as touching which one should be purely subjective—”
“In short,” bitterly I rejoined, “you told Avé to make Edom feel guilty about exposing organs whose exposure is animal-normal.”
“But what can be wrong with that kind of advice, Pan? Right now, because of his strength, the man has all the advantage, and so the women are enslaved. But with this new taboo-advantage, Avé will be able to equalize matters, a little. When Edom grows self-conscious about exposing himself, he will feel inhibited about Ave.”
“She can also overequalize matters. She can emotionally castrate him.”
“Thus, Pan, leading man through frustration and redirection and sublimation into the space age. Instead of being Freudian, why don’t we go watch the first cantrip develop? And then I will explain the second and third cantrips to your mind which clearly requires advanced guidance—”
Edom and Avé sat idyllically on a rock beside Edom’s favorite swimming hole, a lush beflowered viney affair, lined with bedrock, a few hundred yards in mean diameter, free form: it might have been artfully designed for the last word in rusticity. Where they sat, sun through leaves exquisitely flecked their sun-burnished nakedness with gently moving leaf shadows. Man squatted on the rock, legs apart, feet flat-splayed on grass; Woman perched on one of his thighs, her legs dangling between his legs, her toes touching grass: her right arm loose-affectionate about his neck, her left hand offering him the fruit; his left arm about her waist, his great left hand caressing her ribs beneath a breast, his right hand on her right thigh; his great white teeth showing through his black beard, ready to chomp on the fruit.
His head came forward, his jaws open; she drew the fruit away; his smi
le disappeared, but his teeth did not; he frowned at her, his grip on her rib cage and thigh tightening. He said: “Give.”
She warned: “Remember what I said. Just one little bite. See if you get sick.”
“Did you get sick?”
“No—”
“So I won’t get sick.”
Her right arm snaked on around his neck so that her hand clutched his beard to control him, and again her left hand proffered the orange fruit. He chomped. She pulled back. He chewed appreciatively, letting the sweet-pungent juice trickle down his gullet. He swallowed the pulp. He demanded: “More!”
She sprang away from him, holding the wounded fruit behind her. “Not yet. We wait a little while. See if you get sick.”
He shook his head. “I feel good. Better and better. You want me to beat you?”
She shook her head emphatically. “Listen to Ave, now. I have to ask some questions.”
“Why?”
“To see if you are drunk.”
“I can tell if I’m drunk.”
“Not with this fruit. I have to ask questions to know.”
“Who told you to ask questions?”
“Snake did. He gave me the fruit.”
“Snake is wise, I guess. What tree did this come from?”
She told him.
He got (somewhat unsteadily) to his feet. “Nobody supposed to eat this fruit!”
“Who said?”
“My people said! This fruit is taboo!”
“You left your people, remember? You said they were stupider than my people, even!”
He stared at her, confused. He ran a hand back through his long hair.
Deliberately she took a tiny bite of the fruit, chewed it, swallowed it. Then she asserted: “My people said the same thing—the tree is taboo. But Snake says the fruit is good. Snake is wise. But I have to ask questions to see if you get drunk—said Snake.”
Frowning, eyes on fruit, he snapped: “Ask.”