by M. A. Foster
“You appear to be very knowledgeable about our history.”
Fellirian answered, diplomatically, “We hoped to learn from your experiences. You are the forerunners. We have no other example to hand.”
Without evoking confrontation, Fellirian had boxed the woman in, if indeed she were a provocateur for someone else. She could not rebuff her answer without making the background obvious.
“There are other differences?”
“People make much of our memory. It is a total-recall system. It sounds like an advance, I agree, but it has drawbacks. For example, we do not have a structure like your subconscious. In you, that serves as a buffer for contradictory experiences. We have to deal with the same events directly. There is a high degree of skill required, since we are now discussing basic sanity. All do not, of course, attain the preferred skill level. People envy us now for our low rate of reproduction, but it cannot be other than a serious disadvantage. And not only short, but an estrous periodic cycle as well. Twice, rarely three times, and it’s over11. That basically gives us a one-to-one ratio, which is zero population growth from the beginning.”
“May I ask your rate now?”
“One-to-one-point-oh-five or one-to-one-point-oh-six. Doubling every six hundred years. It was held artificially higher at first, but in the last two centuries it has been stable near that figure. Our marriage custom tends to diffuse exceptionally fertile types, so the increase is well-spread.”
Fellirian paused. There was no comment. She continued: “This now means, on the average, that one Braid in six has an extra child. We cut the rate down to that. Our society is complex and delicate, and at a rate of one-to-one-point-two-five every Braid has one extra. You cannot imagine the dislocations such breeding causes. I admit that much of the problem comes from our own ordering of things. For if you have four children of the right ages, pairs five years apart, then they must go into a Braid to mate. If one does not exist, then one must be made for them. Braids have traditional basic occupations, and once set, cannot be changed, within the life of the Braid. It imposes a rate of social change upon us greater than our society has mechanism to adjust to it. We could stand an even lower rate, in my opinion.”
“You said earlier that you were parent phase. You have procreated?”
Fellirian winced, internally, she hoped, at the phrasing of the question. Still, she understood it. Not many humans these days “procreated,” as the woman had put it. And the strictures of the Fertility Board were by far the most exasperating regulations of all. She replied, “Yes. My Braid is one of the one-in-six five-child Braids. I had a third fertility. I have had three children, all normal and live. Their ages are fifteen, ten, and five. A girl and two boys in that order. Their names are Pethmirvin, Kevlendos, and Stheflannai, in the same order. But rest assured. My days in brood are over.”
She now paused to allow the idea to sink in. It was one thing to discuss such concepts in the abstract, quite another to accept such a thing personally, or in the sense of a personal interaction taking place now in the time of the real. She waited. Fellirian was patient. She knew humans well from her long association with them, and looked at none with contempt. They were always full of surprises, the inner person not always matching the outer. Still, she mused, we are not so different in that, either. . . . She also knew very well that the words of a single-channel language were also great illusions; not matching the realities they symbolized, and varying considerably in degree of variance, words tended to persuade the slow that they were one with the swift, and equally, the swift slowed to a crawl.
The woman pondered, drifted, hesitated, took another tack. “You told us about the ler family earlier, but not so much why such a structure. Is there some genetic reason for it?”
“Antigenetic, if anything. We have a small population and a high mutation rate; therefore we want a homogeneous population. We also noted that across time the family tends to become longer, more structured, more important. What we have now mixes us reasonably well, provides social stability and makes change controllable, and is the best compromise so far with our peculiar assets and liabilities. I might add here that an unforeseen consequence of the timing criteria of Braids also tends to bring, over the years, one Braid into resonance with another, and after that such groups form what we call ‘partial superfamilies,’ until terminated by the ending of one of the Braids involved, or the insertion of a vendetta into affairs. My own Braid is so resonant with Klanh Moren: The Thes of one becomes the afterparent of the other.”
“You do not use human terminology to describe your relationships in a family?”
“No. Nor the concepts.”
“Then the effect of resonance must be to reduce variability. It increases order, rather than continuing the randomizing you seem to value.”
“This is true. We are aware of the problem. In fact, there has been consideration of declaring such a pattern to be not desirable, and prohibiting it. It is not at this time. One of the reasons why the practice continues is that with such a small population as we have we are all rather close relations anyway. In your terms, we are all not less than sixth-cousins or something very close to that. Right now, superfamily resonance with a Braid-pair has no appreciable effect. A triplet, of course, maintained over several generations, would, and is not permitted. Now, later, when our numbers are much greater, hundreds of thousands, I think resonance of any sort will be prohibited. It is, as you say, a producer of more order. But you have to realize that our oldest Braids are just now only at generation fourteen in the adults-to-be, who are now yet adolescent.”
The woman seemed to be at a loss. She hesitated, as if waiting for something, moving her weight from one foot to another, a motion which produced transient heavy wrinkles to appear and fade in her garments, which were made of some heavy, stiff dark material, somewhat shiny or lustrous, which seemed more intended for use in furniture or draperies than in clothing. Additionally, the style was full of pleats, folds, tucks, darts, and gave the impression of adding bulk. The women wore skirts that fell gracelessly below the knees, while the men wore in their place heavy oversized pantaloons. The upper garments, composed of several layers of undershirts, shirts, vests, jackets, and various accessories, were similar to one another and continued the style. Fellirian watched the woman closely, sensing the others out of the corners of her eyes. The woman seemed to be waiting for some cue, to go on.
A man not far from the woman cleared his throat and asked, politely, “Fourteen? Is that all?”
The woman resumed her seat, seemingly in great relief. Fellirian answered, “Just so, fourteen. My own generation of the Derens is only generation eleven. Of the old families, we are relative newcomers.”
“Let me think,” the man mused, half to himself. “That would, at thirty-five years per generation, put the firstborn of the oldest generation back to, say, about 2050 or 2060. But didn’t Braid family structure date from a later date, in the twenty-second century?”
Fellirian’s sense of oppression increased. “True. But the two items are not contradictory. Braids were tried first on a limited scale by those who believed in them. They were adopted somewhat later by the whole of the people.”
“Are those Braids still in existence now?”
“Yes. The two Player Braids, the Perklarens and the Terklarens. They were not, at the time, Players, you understand, but in fact members of a peculiar religious order, if I have my history straight. Now, I believe, the Perklarens are at Ghen Disosi, generation fourteen. The Terklarens are at thirteen, although due to disresonance between them individual members of equivalent ages are about ten years older.”
“And fourteen has much of the same nonnumerical symbolic significance to you that ten would have, say, to us.”
“Yes . . . there is a similarity, an equivalence.”
“Odd, that. I have heard of a book, called The Wisdom of the Prophets, in which mention is made to ‘marvels and wonders in the house of the last single generation.’
”
Fellirian let herself drift from affirmation into ambiguity. “I have heard also of the work you mention. However, you must bear in mind that its origin has been questioned. It has not ever been accepted as cult dogma by any theosophical society of our people in my knowledge. And, of course, prophecy is always somewhat equivocal.”
“You do not agree with the content of Wisdom?”
“I read a copy here at the Institute when I was adolescent. I found the concepts therein rather repugnant. It heavily stresses the concept of serial evolution, which is erroneous, and it injects a competitive aspect into affairs between the inhabitants of Earth which does not ring true.” Fellirian felt threatened by the circumstances of the questions. Never had she faced such a situation. All her intuitions warned her; she could not resist however, letting go one last sally, just to make matters clear. “You are, sir, doubtless familiar with a similar work, I believe called Protocols of the Elders of Zion? I personally place Wisdom in the same category. Indeed, in Wisdom I felt an alien mind at work, one not compatible with myself.”
“You don’t think Wisdom is of ler origin?”
“I know not the number of thumbs on the hand of he who wrote. I speak of the ideals of the author, which is of the domain of the mind. And, at any rate, I know of no marvels. The Player Braids are both rather withdrawn and uncommunicative. They keep to their own affairs, which I imagine is Gameplaying. And also I am not a follower of the Game, so they could very well perform a marvel and I would be unaware of it.” Now let this one make something out of that, she thought.
He said, “Excellent, excellent. You have clarified the matter beyond any possible doubt for me. I am doubly reassured. I do have some more questions, but they are inconsequential.”
“Not at all. I am here to answer them.”
“In many ways, to us, you maintain a primitive style of living. I mean no judgment of relativity here, but merely describe. You have no method of temperature control in your houses save the family hearth, and that is useful only in the winter, for example. You virtually ignore vehicular transport, when a number of sophisticated mechanisms are located only no more than fifty miles from the heart of the reservation. To the observer, if I may put it politely, you assume primitive modes by choice. May I ask why? It is a curious matter.”
Fellirian paused, then began: “The first lived among you and shared your manners and styles. But they soon came to believe two things: that your culture reflects your needs, not the needs of all creatures, hence us also. And that in many instances, you had inserted the widespread use of artifacts without considering the consequences of such introductions. The classic study in this area, concerning the automobile, concentrates not on what it did to your previous value system, but in the measurable increase it caused in the size of your cities, an increase and a lowering of density which had profound, unseen effects on your society for years. These things, by the way, most conclusively did not result from increases in population. Indeed, we still feel echoes of the period in this century. It was apparent, then, that artifacts had enormous influence on culture, having the power to change many parts of it. The prediction of such effects is an arcane discipline, and in some cases not greatly more reliable than the reading of tea leaves. Therefore we had seen and were wary. We are accused of conservatism. Not so. We are merely cautious. We desire change and improvement, but we also desire that we, the objects of such change, have some willed control over the rate of change. Is this not reasonable? Therefore we moved into the woods and eschewed central heating. And vehicles. They expand the requirement for space greatly. Now we have the space to live and breathe. Why trade it for momentary and selfish conveniences?”
“You sound critical.”
“Not so. You were not aware of the principle of consequence. We would not have been either, had we not seen your example and been warned. But there is more, of course. We wish to see things develop to reflect us, not a copy of you. We had to go far back, into primitiveness, if you will, to find it.”
“Have you found it?’
“It is not expected for many spans.”
“How long?”
“Not in my lifetime, nor that of my children’s children.”
The man nodded, as if he understood, and sat back in his seat. Another took his place. The latest one was rather younger than the first two, and more polished, almost offhand. Fellirian felt as if the focus of a terrible, concentrated attention suddenly had been removed from her. Not withdrawn, but no longer weighing and measuring her. Yes, that was the word. Weighing. What was the source? She glanced about the room covertly. There was no indication of anything amiss.
Vance breathed deeply, relieved also. Although the two visitors had not exceeded the lines of general propriety, they had overplayed it, he thought. Now this next fellow: probably was a regular fellow. He certainly appeared to be, although it was not out of the realm of possibility that he too was part of the act of the previous two. Two to provoke, and one to lend controlled and measured relaxation phase. It was, after all, one of the techniques of the men of history. This one seemed to be some very minor careerist out on a boondoggle, traveling around. Vance privately knew such trips to be a waste; he had seen so much even in his limited travels. Earth, at least about ninety-five percent of it, was as homogeneous as variations in climate allowed. What had been Bulgaria did not now differ appreciably from what had once been New Jersey; Vance caught himself wondering if it ever had. Surely places differed? The light must be different, the odors, the constituents of the soil? Vance thought further: few now ever saw the open sky, and when they did they disregarded it to the extent possible. The rest of objective experience was similarly shifted from the natural. Vance thought of Fellirian and what he knew of her; her perceptions were honed so fine that she could claim her nearest neighbors, the resonant-in-time Morens, actually lived in another country, one whose strangeness always amazed her. The Morens lived slightly more than a mile away. Such microprovincialization was common among them; in fact, it was a minor art form and diligently pursued, although with recognition that one of its limitations was that the “provinces” tended to grow rapidly the farther they were away from the viewer. The object of the art form was ultimately to bring everybody’s perceptions into agreement and divide their whole world up into micro-provinces, purely as an exercise in perception.
Vance glanced at the roster of the visitors, to see if he could catch a hint of where the questioners had originated. He looked in vain; the whole list was comprised of programmed names, which of course gave no hint whatsoever of national or ethnic origin. Vance also felt some irritation. He was the only human in the room not having a programmed name. The visitors probably secretly regarded him as one of the obstructionists.
The most recent questioner seemed friendly, even apologetic for taking their time. He asked, “You must excuse my curiosity, but I have found today’s tour fascinating. There is only one question I cannot lay to rest: what do you do for entertainment? I can imagine sleeping out of doors now and again, but after a time I should imagine becoming stifled by nothing to see but woods and nothing to do but survive.”
It was tactlessly put and poorly phrased, but Fellirian thought she understood what the young man was getting at. She looked away for a moment, through the window into the deepening evening. She felt a wave of fatigue pass over her and wished to be on her way home. She turned back, her voice on the edge of a companionable chuckle: “You would be astounded to learn how much time is spent in the process of being primitive.” She laughed her laugh again. “The children have to be instructed, there is the Klanh profession, the work of supporting the household, cleaning, washing, tending the garden and the stock. Our individual competences. Hauling water. This last is the reason for the tradition of building each yos close to running water. Entertainment? By the time I reach home tonight I won’t need any.” She became more serious. “Please don’t take us for an assemblage of dour work-lovers, drudges of yard and kitche
n. We have our own humors and games and pastimes, some of them subtle and intricate. And there are many other things; we tell tales to one another, sing, dance. Cultivate friendships, and enemyhoods, too. There is a whole cycle in itself on that last alone. I come here often, so I feel more at home in your house, but even so, I find myself bewildered by the entertainments you have. I would fall asleep trying to sample even a few of them.”
“You don’t sound bored.”
“No. We have tried to order things so that ennui is at least one enemy we do not have to face. Boredom leads to revolutionary desires, not oppression, there. And change-of-boredom never improves. It gets worse. No, speaking for myself and those I know, I want no change. Only my own life.”
Fellirian intended to say more, but something checked her, and she stopped. As it was, she felt naggingly that perhaps she had said more than she had intended to. Well, too late. The words were now birds in flight. But she thought she knew the source of the oppressive feelings during the meeting: yes, she was certain, although she could not prove it. She had been monitored. The questioners had been bait for someone else, offstage, listening, recording. She nodded to the last questioner, the young man, as if to indicate she was finished. Expressing his gratitude, he resumed his seat. Fellirian looked over the rest. They had lost interest in today’s matters, and in the ler and the Institute. Now they were anxious to depart. It was an emotion she could appreciate, even share. She was anxious to leave as well. So now they had seen the famous New Humans. Well, they weren’t so special after all, were they? The only thing they had really been interested in, although they went to some pains to conceal it, had been in adolescent sexual behavior and mores, which, to their minds, seemed indistinguishable from simple promiscuity. And of course that which they wanted most to see, Fellirian was unable to deliver for them.