Everything in Ascherman’s face that had been held taut and alert for each of ibn Haj’s words now drops away. Ibn Haj’s words reveal a popular misconception, one that Ascherman must have thought the general was beyond.
“Isn’t pan-slazan like Nostratic?” he asks. “It’s their first language, but it hasn’t changed into many other languages.”
“The generalized structure of language,” I say, “is structured by biology. Vocabulary can’t be. Even birds have to learn the songs they sing.”
I think this will be enough. Ibn Haj is nodding. But Ascherman has to explain that Nostratic is not really the first language; that notion is a centuries-old fiction; Nostratic is a language created from both the sounds all languages have in common and the concepts that all cultures have in common; that it starts with root ideas from foraging cultures, adds on agricultural notions, then industrial, then informational, until you have a panhuman language useful for all intercultural communication. Fawiza then has to add on: No human has ever been to one of the slazan homeworlds; who’s to say there aren’t dozens of slazan languages?
We go on like this all day because, of course, Fawiza’s very good question is unanswerable. I will learn pan-slazan and hope there’s enough structure and similar vocabulary that I can learn whatever the natives are speaking.
“There’s a lot we can learn from just watching,” Fawiza says.
“Is that true with sapients?” Ascherman asks. “Isn’t half of human life based on how we interpret others’ actions?”
I recite, “There’s the action and there’s the intent; there’s the interpretation of the recipient of the action, and there’s the interpretation of the audience, and finally there’s the response to the action, all of which is influenced by the context of the previous relationships of every actor involved.” I shake my head wearily, dramatizing my exhaustion with all this talk. “I’m hungry. Can we go out for dinner?”
Ibn Haj decides both that it’s inappropriate for us all to be seen together and that if I was to be seen with anyone, it would raise fewer questions if I was seen with Ascherman. The two of us go into the Christian quarter to a Latino restaurant, which in keeping with our mood is dimly lit. Ascherman is concerned what his wife will think if he is seen dining alone with an attractive woman. He looks disconcerted by the cliché but doesn’t know how to recover. I don’t say anything, but I, too, don’t want to be seen by anyone. I don’t know what I’d say to Judith or Lila if they were to see me here. But Judith works on her research at night, and Lila works on her husband. I find I miss their conversation. Ascherman and I have little to say, for the only thing that binds us together can’t be discussed in public.
The next three days in my flat go better. I call up the notes I took from the previous week, and we start going through the various issues. I want to chart out subsistence. A solitary animal can provide for its own subsistence if it is vegetarian. But slazans‚ like humans, are poorly designed to compete with lions and jackals. Survival requires cooperation.
Among the Ju/wasi‚ marriage is the central agreement of cooperation. The majority of the calories are provided by the wife, who gathers for the members of her nuclear family and any visitors to her fire. The meat is provided by the husband, who hunts large animals in small groups, taking advantage of the shared knowledge of men. A newly wed husband will live with his wife’s family until several children are born. He will prove he is a good enough hunter to provide for their daughter, and he will provide a share of meat, which his father-in-law can share among his kin, reinforcing bonds with his many family members.
We know that although slazans prefer their solitude, they can work cooperatively; otherwise, there would not be the rambling cities they build, nor the spaceships, nor the lengthy war they fight so well. But how do they go about insuring such cooperation? Who gathers the fruit and tubers? Who hunts the meat? Who tans the skins and who makes such fine designs on them? Who gathers the wood and builds the fire? Is there division of labor by sex? What reinforces it? What is exchanged? What does the individual provide for herself? Where do they establish residence? Most foraging populations have to move through an area during the course of the year: how do we identify individuals and follow their movement? Do we offer gifts marked with isotopes and see how often those gifts, if they are accepted, change hands over the study period?
“What about leadership?” asks ibn Haj.
“Simple foragers tend to be pretty egalitarian,” I say. “Leadership is ad hoc. They listen to whose opinion they trust. But they spend a lot of time teasing each other mercilessly. No one’s allowed to rise above anyone else. You get leaders with intensification: you need to do something big—build a large weir, chase animals off a cliff, organize a war party—and a single coordinator becomes necessary. It usually happens when the population is denser, when you have to get more out of the territory you inhabit.”
“Perhaps,” Ascherman says, “a good reason to land near the shore, where the population is densest.”
“We have to remember,” Fawiza says, “that these are slazans. They are not Ju/wasi in alien skin. They are not humans with a different language. We know of no slazan word for marriage. We know of no slazan word for father. We know little about child rearing, except that it seems to be the mother’s task. And the words for leadership in pan-slazan are ambiguously translated at best. Let’s make sure we schedule the research so Pauline is open to new questions. If she’s over-scheduled, she’ll tend to see along the biases of the research plan. Anthropologists who look for leaders find leaders. Anthropologists who look for dominance hierarchy can always find it. After she gets habituated, Pauline will have less than two hundred days for her actual study. We want her to find what is really there.”
I continue to have dinner with Ascherman because I need to be free of my flat’s confines. We talk theory. We talk about the Raman probes. We talk about what it’s like being a Jew married to a Muslim. He tells me stories about occasions when both sides of the family are brought together. I wish Judith were here; she’d love Ascherman’s stories of casual misunderstandings, covert animosities, and unexpected friendships. I tell him of my parents living in the village where my father grew up, of my brothers who live in the same village, and of my sisters who are married and living where their husbands were children. “How out of place you must feel,” he says, “when you go home.”
“Oh, no,” I say. “I love going home. It’s a great life they live, as long as I don’t have to live it.”
At night I look at experiential programs for the shuttle’s intelligence. We are going to be collecting so many images that the intelligence will have to be adept at classifying, sorting, and analyzing, but the day when Fawiza and I started talking about multivariate analysis of variance and discriminate analysis and cluster analysis, ibn Haj threw up his hands and told us he’d trust our decision. So after saying good night to Ascherman, I go through reviews, preview simulations, and the like, trying to sleep at night, but sleep is impossible. There are too many things to think about, to consider. I want the research impeccable. I want it done right. I want to produce an ethnography that no one can misuse.
I don’t check my computer for messages.
On the Muslim sabbath ibn Haj leaves us for over an hour to go to the mosque. Fawiza and I argue extensively about which programs to choose for the shuttle’s intelligence. Ascherman is at a loss as to what to say. Fawiza and I have done so much research that we’re committed to our choices. Each system has its failings, and we despise the failings belonging to the systems the other has chosen.
When ibn Haj returns, he asks if we can take all the systems. When he finds they’re incompatible, produced by rival firms who don’t want you to meld various versions, he says, “Let’s go with what Pauline wants. She has to use the system for the duration of her stay.”
Fawiza sulks after that, a surprising reaction for one with so much prestige. Our discussions falter because they’re all about speci
fic research plans, and Fawiza is the one who has guided dozens of ethnographers into hundreds of different field situations. A pall is cast over the entire day. We’ve been in the same room for far too long. There are huge gaps of silence. We stare at the long itineraries and charts we’ve devised. The last two months still have to be accounted for.
The pounding at the door doesn’t come as a surprise. It fits in with the tone of the day. Ibn Haj switches off the clear screen on the kitchen table and goes into the bathroom. I open the door. It’s Judith. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to keep her out. She’s hugging me, talking about how worried she’s been. There had been that upset two weeks ago, and last week I had looked so depressed, and no one had seen me this week… well, she had expected the worst… and then she stops. She sees Ascherman—“Hello, Dovid”—and then she sees Fawiza, and then she turns to me. “I guess I don’t quite fit in here.”
Ascherman has to be with his family that night for the sabbath. Fawiza has to catch up on work at the Institute. Ibn Haj offers to stay, and I almost say yes. The solitude of the flat closes in on me, and I call Judith.
She doesn’t say hello. “Are you a Kiplinger now?”
I don’t know what to say.
“Don’t lie to me,” she says.
I nod. The screen goes blank. I should have lied.
Ascherman isn’t there the next day out of respect for the sabbath. Ibn Haj asks me a lot about Judith. He sounds solicitous and concerned. He knows how horrible it is to break with a friend. But he asks far too many questions. Then, as we get back to work, he begins to defer to my opinion. The next two months of research begin to look exactly as I want them. I start to hear Judith’s voice: This is how he eases your doubts‚ this is how he hooks you in. Ibn Haj doesn’t understand Fawiza’s very esoteric but very good objections. I’m tired of objections, even good ones, especially good ones. “I’m weeks behind on Institute work,” Fawiza finally says. “Do you really need me here?”
On the Christian sabbath Ascherman returns. He looks awful. His skin is pale. There are dark circles under his eyes. He hasn’t shaved. Ibn Haj conducts business as if everything’s fine. I want to ask Ascherman what’s wrong. I expect to hear that his wife is upset about the hours he’s been keeping.
We go over the final plans. Tomorrow I go up to a military orbital while the last of the requisitions are made. Fawiza will announce a last-minute grant that will send me to do some studies on As-Sabr and a Christian utopian community orbiting Earth.
There are several clear weeks left in the schedule. I want to hike out to the empty village. I want to do a thorough inventory. I want to know if these slazans were a group of primal Utopians.
“What does it matter how they started?” Ascherman asks. “They’re there and trying to live out their lives. What else matters?”
Ibn Haj looks to Ascherman as if his face will reveal the source of such a strange question. After a moment the general once again okays my plans.
It is my last night in Wadi al-Uyoun. Ibn Haj is off finalizing plans for my departure. Fawiza hugs me goodbye and wishes me luck. Ascherman takes me to the Latino restaurant in the Christian quarter. “I guess this is your farewell party,” he says.
It isn’t much of a party. Dovid drinks too much wine and tells me what a mistake he’s made. He was the one years ago who convinced the Muslim-Hindu Investment Developers to fund this Raman probe. When the probe came back, he didn’t have the funds to analyze the data, so he created a secret budget, siphoned off funds from other projects. When he found a humansafe world with a colony of slazans‚ he hid the knowledge from the investors, who had a legal right to it, and instead spent days looking into the reputation of various generals to see who would use this data in the best way.
“They confiscated the data yesterday,” he says. “The Muslim-Hindu Investment Developers gave it to the military in return for several key contracts. It’s all locked away. No one at our center has access to a bit of it.”
“That’s not surprising. This whole operation has been classified,”
“You’re a scholar, Pauline. You know what it means when no one has access to data. No one believes it if it isn’t accessible on the net. As far as the world is concerned, these one thousand slazans don’t exist. If ibn Haj ordered them to be exterminated, no one would know, because only a handful of people know about their existence. And without direct evidence, no one will believe any of us if the military does something wrong.”
“Why would they exterminate them, Dovid?”
“Because it’s a humansafe world. If the slazans don’t know about it, it’s our world. If we win the war, it’s our world. But if the peace is negotiated, then a world with slazans on it becomes part of the settlement.”
“You’re overreacting,” I say, even though his doubts take hold of my imagination.
He starts to go on about the one thousand slazans. When did we once think about them? Why didn’t we once say it would be better if they lived out their lives without ever seeing a single human being? He wishes he’d blown up the Research Center and destroyed all the data. But then there would have been lives lost, careers destroyed. He couldn’t have done that to his family.
I want to hear the voice of justice; I want him to be one of the rabbis I listened to once in my youth, the voice calm, the logic measured, the wisdom steeped in millennia of tradition, but Ascherman’s voice is blurred by alcohol, his hands around my hand, warm and sweaty, his gaze that of a man whose seduction has failed and who hopes that sympathy will do the same work as desire. I look at him and imagine the man who, at the start of his career, had been energetic, full of charisma and enthusiasm, who had attracted a Muslim wife, and who now had discovered that what was right was not what society wanted. There is no potency here, as there is with ibn Haj, who keeps his prestige and dignity because what he works for is in accord with what is socially valued.
I don’t let Ascherman walk me home because I don’t have the heart to say no. He embraces me tightly and wishes me luck.
In bed that night I am restless. I can’t get Ascherman’s questions out of my mind.
An ethnographer learns through trust. I will be asking a number of slazans to trust me, to let me tell their stories to others, to ones who hate their kind. But I won’t have landed with ibn Haj and the General above him. Neither has asked for the same trust, and so neither will be honor-bound to respect it.
I start to hear Judith’s voice all night long.
I tell her this is the only way. The minute others can read about slazans‚ can see how they live, view how they struggle to survive like everyone else, then the hatred will dissipate. Hate grows from fiction. To hate well, you have to transform a person into someone unreal, someone less complex. You can’t hate well someone you understand.
Maybe, Judith says. She sounds dubious. But they will listen well only if they trust your goals. Only if they want to trust what you have to say.
Chapter Four
The Third Day
The second morning after the boulder had appeared in the clearing, the land was covered with damp fog the color of stone. When I emerged from her hut, Huggable and her daughter were waiting for her by the scorched ground of the winter fire, the trees beyond them black shadows amid the fog. Before the trees sat a basket of nuts. Hanging from a limb were strips of meat. Huggable was hushing her daughter, telling her that the healer would take care of her when the time was right. “I like my dreams,” said the daughter. Huggable’s hand swung out, ready to strike, but before I’s gaze the mother converted the gesture into a caress and stroked her daughter’s cheek. I pitied the daughter who dreamed of embraces, but I no longer felt any kindness for the mother. It was easy to say, “Come back in two days.”
“I brought meat, not fish. It’s good meat. A woman who one or another call Childless Crooked watched my daughter so I could track the lightfoot, and she wanted half the meat. I do not know enough women to hunt often here by the river. M
y daughter embraced Crooked too many times, and Crooked struck her. My daughter needs your help. I can bring more meat. You can have my entire share of the meat.”
I hesitated. The woman should have brought fish. She should be offering the rest of the meat to those who lived nearby. She was selfish or she was desperate if she was to offer all the meat to the healer. Perhaps I should stay. The boulder was not going to leave, and a girl the size of Huggable’s daughter should not be so full of embraces. But I strapped on the gzaet. “Come back this afternoon,” she said. “For now, I accept the basket of nuts.” She left them behind and made her way through the mist.
She reached the edge of the clearing, the world nothing but trees and fog and the faint colors of a fire that had almost burned itself out. The boulder was invisible, and she was straining to make out the blackened ground around it when she heard an odd sound, like someone humming. It was a tuneless hum, and so brief that it was eerie. I stopped and held still. She told herself she was hunting, that there was a lightfoot nearby and she didn’t want to scare it off. From where the boulder should have been, she heard the very quiet, far too quiet, sound of footsteps. Then nothing but the usual forest sounds. The mist cleared. Sunlight cut it apart and cleared it from the ground so everything could be seen.
Standing in front of the thing was an animal that stood like any man or woman stood. Its skin was the color of the clay that Old Sour Plum had used to make pots when he had been younger. The hair on the animal’s head was the color of night, the texture of root moss. And it was modestly dressed around the waist like anyone who could walk off into the bushes should be dressed. It had two teats, but there was no infant to be seen, unless it was now sleeping inside the giant rock, for the rock now had an opening, shaped very much like the opening of a hut. The inside was dark.
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