by John Brunner
“Hah! Good to be back in a chair—those Yannish cushions must take getting used to.” Chart dropped his bony frame into one and gestured; the wine poured itself, and a full mug soared to within easy reach of Marc’s hand. Morag chose a seat a little to one side, as though preferring to be audience at this encounter. A faint smile played around her lips.
“Your health,” Chart said, seizing a mug which had risen before him in similar manner. “To the man with the greatest grasp of Yannish culture!” He drank, set the mug down, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “What is shrimashey, by the way?”
It was all going too quickly for Marc to follow, accustomed as he had been for years to the leisurely pace of Yannish society. Morag put her hand on Chart’s shoulder.
“You’re rushing him!” she exclaimed, and added to Marc, “You’ll have to forgive him—he says he’s always like this when a project really grabs hold of his imagination.”
“True, true!” Chart gave a chuckle. “Yes, I’m sorry—I must appear a bit overwhelming in this state. Never mind! Can you tell me? It’s what I most need to know.”
“Well, it’s—uh—it’s primarily a population-balancing mechanism,” Marc said after a pause. “But you must have heard about that.”
“Oh, of course! I have kilometres, lightyears, parsecs of tape about it!” Chart gestured, and part of the surrounding glade faded away in favour of a display of shrimashey in progress in the open air, a satellite view of one of the rare public outbreaks which occurred perhaps once in ten or fifteen years and involved half the population of a town. Marc had seen this particular recording before, and it made his spine crawl now as it had done the first time: the sight of those masses of adult, mature Yanfolk piling into a writhing heaving confusion of bodies.
There had been eight deaths on that occasion.
“Everyone can find out that after a birth,” Chart said, “the adult Yanfolk meet in groups and drink this—this drug which turns off their higher rational faculties, turning over their physical responses to the lower ganglion in the spine. That’s the same one which is involved in sexual contact, right?”
Sexual contact…
Abruptly the entire story of Morag Feng sprang into Marc’s memory. He had heard it once, barely paid attention… but now it came back with a crash. He said faintly, “Ah—yes!”
And wondered whether news of her return had yet reached Alice Ming.
“You’ll forgive me, I hope,” Chart murmured, “but in view of the—ah—the fact that you live with a Yannish girl I’d like to ask about this compatibility we have.”
Hot words boiled to Marc’s lips, but Morag forestalled what he would have said. She leaned forward and smiled.
“Gregory has heard all about it from a woman’s point of view, Marc. He’d like to ask a man, as well.”
Defeated, Marc leaned back in his chair, offered his mug to the jug for a refill and received it automatically, and said, “Well, you probably know that there’s this organ, the caverna veneris, and when it’s put in contact with the male proboscis it begins to—to throb, and massages these little flakes of skin off it. Which is what fertilises the female, only it’s highly inefficient because the incidence of pregnancy averages twice a lifetime for a Yannish female, and they’re sexually active from about age twenty-four to age one hundred thirty-five. It’s not the same as it is with us, in that there’s not the same element of tension in it, and there’s no actual orgasm, no climax, but it’s tremendously—uh—pleasurable for them, and so they like to do a lot of it. And there’s this strong emotional commitment involved. Not like making love together among humans. More like—uh—agreeing to make a trip to another planet together. Something like that. A—a commitment.” He gulped more wine.
“And the male has this same—what did you call it?—this same throbbing reflex,” Chart pursued. “I see. And this is controlled by the corresponding lower spinal ganglion, the same which is activated during shrimashey, and… And it’s gratifying to a human?”
There was something repulsive in Chart’s tone, as though he were a voyeur, perverted. His voice sounded dirty. Mac was on the verge of a heated retort—though he could never have explained in a single sentence just what it was he felt having Shyalee as a mistress, all the overtones of flattery, of determination to bridge interstellar gulfs as perhaps in the long-ago Dark Ages a few brave individuals had tried to bridge the gap between races and language-groups—when Morag said sharply, “Yes!”
And he had to admit the same was true for a man, and meekly echoed her.
“But no climax,” Chart mused. “Does that mean there’s some truth in the notion that shrimashey itself is a sort of orgasm—an instant discharge of neurotic and antisocial tendencies?”
Marc recovered abruptly from the distaste Chart’s previous remark had evoked in him, and felt a stab of respect. If he was aware of that notion, he must have dug very deep indeed into the corpus of data human investigators had accumulated about the Yanfolk.
“There is a theory to that effect,” Marc said after a pause to sip his wine. “I’m inclined to it myself. One knows that human orgasm does discharge tension. One would expect a similar need in the Yanfolk. What one finds is…” He spread his hands.
“Catharsis instead,” Chart proposed.
“Well put! Yes, ‘catharsis’ is the nearest any human language has come to a concept relating to shrimashey.”
“And it works,” Chart murmured.
“Something works,” parried Marc. “At any rate, their—”
“Their society has been stable for millennia,” Chart cut in. “I heard about that. But what interests me most of all is— Did you know a census had been conducted on Yan regularly for the past century?”
“What?” Marc stared at him. “But the Yanfolk…”
Oh. Not by them. By us.
“I see you caught on quickly,” Chart smiled. “Yes, we have carried out a regular census ever since first contact. Did you know there are always one point eight times ten to the seventh Yanfolk, and there has never, in the past century, been a deviation from this figure amounting to more than five?”
Marc re-heard the words in recent memory… and jolted so violently he spilled his wine over his hand. He said hoarsely, “It can’t be that exact!”
“The census?” Chart said.
“No, the… The population-control mechanism.” Marc felt his eyes forced out to staring roundness.
“Apparently it is,” that was Morag. “When I left here—you knew I’d been here before? Yes, I can read in your face that you did—when I left here, I determined to find out everything that was known about Yan, down to the things which Earthsider bureaucrats are so scared by that they’re keeping them secret. I lost count of the men I had to seduce before I got what I wanted—though the experience stood me in good stead, you might say, because of Gregory.”
Chart shared a wolfish grin with her, which paradoxically made him look older, not younger.
“Maybe it’s because of the way I’ve always worked,” he said now, “in that I’ve always exploited the latest technical advances—like this ship, which they built for me on Tubalcain to replace my former vessel—for artistic ends. But I seem, with guidance from Morag, to have detected a number of otherwise unnoticed patterns in Yannish culture. The precision with which shrimashey controls the population is known, of course, to the Earthsiders who thought of making census counts. They’ve done nothing with the data, though, except record them. I’m fascinated with a sexual reflex which incorporates a population-control technique of such precision. I’m fascinated by the existence of a drug which facilitates this shrimashey. This is the legacy, for me, of the so-called dramaturges. The Mutine Flash, the Mullom Wat, the Gladen Menhirs—they’re static objects, aren’t they? But this is a process, built in to the adult members of a numerous species, operating over millennial And another thing! The Mutine Epics which you have so admirably translated!”
“What about them?” Marc forced out.
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“How many books of them are there?”
“Why—why, eleven!”
“I think there are twelve,” Chart said with deliberation. “I think I’ve spotted something you—with respect—overlooked. They are not just poems, they are a technical manual, and all that is missing is the key.”
XII
Marc said eventually, “I don’t think I quite understand.”
“Alchemy,” Chart said. “Are you familiar with the magical and alchemical manuals they wrote on Earth some fifteen hundred years ago?”
The implication behind the words, of course, was: I am. With genuine humility, Marc admitted that he was not.
“I had to look into them last time I was hired by the continent of Europe.” Chart drained his mug and let the jug refill it. His manner was lazy, casual, off-hand, that of a man with supreme and unchallengeable competence. “They were composed in a sort of association-code, using agreed conventional images—dragons, astrological figures, various oblique references of that kind. Provided one had been trained in the jargon, one could read them with relative ease. Outsiders, however, found only obscure and baffling nonsense. As a matter of fact, I’m astonished that you yourself aren’t grounded in that area. Nothing I’ve run across, apart from those alchemical manuals, remotely resembles your rendering of the Mutine Epics.”
“But the version you have,” Marc hastened to point out, “is terrible! I was so proud of it a few years ago—and now I realise just what its shortcomings are.”
“Can you rectify them?” Chart demanded.
“I…” Marc licked his lips. “Some of them,” he said at length.
“Good. As you’ve no doubt gathered, this ship is equipped with one of the most superb computers ever designed, a late model from Tubalcain with approximately sixteen megabrains’ capacity. Three or four times what you need to run a go-board, for example. Currently I have the two versions of the Mutine Epics—the translation you made, and the facsimile of the original which you deposited with the university that published it—running as a sub-programme, for reconciliation and comparison with all the alchemical manuals I’ve been able to locate. So far there’s a high degree of concordance in that subtlest of attributes, style. I put it to you that the dramaturges of Yan, the so-called ‘great scientists’ of this planet, were nothing of the kind, but aesthetically biased. In a word, they were artists.”
“Strangely enough,” Marc said after a moment, “I’d been thinking just before Morag found me that you were the nearest human being I’d ever heard of to the Yannish dramaturges.”
“Interesting!” Chart raised his eyebrows. “Because it’s a parallel which had not escaped me.” He spoke without false modesty. “Even through the filter of this translation which you now deprecate, I sensed a certain rapport.”
“But this—this notion of the Epics as a technical manual,” Marc said, reverting to the point which had sunk deep into his mind and begun to fester there, “is… Well, an interesting hypothesis, of course. What evidence have you for it, though?”
“I think I’ll ask the ship for an opinion,” Chart said with a shrug. “It’s been analysing the content of the conversation I just had with Kaydad, Goydel and Vetcho.” He checked. “Before I consult it, one more point. Am I correct in thinking that the Yanfolk would have selected their most—most conservative individuals to deal with us Earthsiders? I hinted as much to the computer.”
“Oh, definitely,” Marc declared. “There’s an image which I’ve heard used, which perhaps ordinary people living in the enclave might not have run across. They talk as though the structure of their society were a tower, like the Mullom Wat, which has just that degree of flexibility needed to endure storms without resisting them. And the peak of the tower, the bit which sways furthest of all, is the bit which has to be of the finest workmanship.”
“I see.” Chart rubbed his chin. “The Mullom Wat, if I recall aright, is the one of the ancient artefacts which we would be hard put to it to duplicate?”
“Oh yes!” Marc was beginning to be caught up in the discussion now; he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “That’s even more amazing than the Mutine Mandala: a single ovoidal column in the middle of the Ocean of Scand, one piece a hundred and thirty metres long, sunk through twenty metres of water into fifteen metres of bedrock and ooze. You’ve probably heard that the engineers attached to the first expedition, the discoverers of Yan, tried to think of a way of imitating it, and short of firing it vertically downwards there isn’t one. Besides, there’s no sign of violence around the foundation, and the material it’s made from, a ceramic like porcelain, couldn’t have stood the shock anyhow.”
“I’ve heard about that, yes,” Chart nodded. “But it doesn’t do anything, does it? I mean, not in the sense that the Mutine Mandala does.”
“Well, in high winds it does sing, like any open-ended pipe,” Marc said. “But that’s all.” He hesitated, glancing at Morag. “By the way, I have to admit that I didn’t place Morag’s name when we met—not immediately.”
She gave him a smile which didn’t involve her eyes.
“I remember now, though. Weren’t you the first person to experience the Mutine Flash from inside the Mandala?”
Her hand closed on her wine-mug so tightly that the knuckles showed paper-white. “I was,” she said thinly after a tense pause. “Am I not still the only one?”
“I tried it,” Marc said.
“Did you now? And—?”
“I went insane,” Marc muttered, looking down into his own mug. “Afterwards, I promised myself I’d gradually work my way back to it. And I never have. I don’t even make a point of seeing it every day.”
“This Flash,” Chart said. “Morag has told me about it, obviously. I gather it’s unique—I mean, as a manifestation of function—among the ancient relics. What do you think it is?”
“I know only what the Epics say it is,” Marc countered.
“Yes,” Chart sighed. “They say it’s the total information concerning their skills which the dramaturges enshrined in pillars of crystal, a sort of recording which the sun would daily replay until the end of the world. You believe that?”
“I think I do,” Marc said. “Only I’m not sure that any human could ever understand the mode of communication employed. I suspect you’d need to have the Yannish lower ganglion, the one which is turned loose by the sheyashrim drug, to absorb those data.”
“But the Yanfolk don’t pay attention to their relics!” Morag broke in. “Do they?”
“True,” Marc conceded. “Oh, you see children going to look them over now and then, but adults generally don’t make a point of bothering. Even if they’re on a journey to a far-distant city, which they’ve never made before, and it’s taking weeks, they won’t trouble to make a five-kilometre detour and visit a relic on the way.”
“Do you really think it’s the lack of a lower ganglion of Yannish type which prevents a human from absorbing the Mutine message?” Chart said. “Or do you think it’s because the dust from the Ring garbles the solar spectrum?”
Marc stared at him for long moments. He said at last, “I—I wish I’d thought of that! It makes sense! Can it be tested?”
“Of course it can. I’m already testing it. Or, to be exact, I shall be with effect from tomorrow noon. If the Yanfolk never bother to go near their relics, they presumably won’t mind my parking a remote sensor inside the Mandala, feeding back to my computer here. What it will do is simple: it’ll record the Flash, for days on end, looking for the high peaks, the signal hidden in the noise, and then filter the noise out Eventually, with luck, I shall be able to duplicate the Mandala here inside the ship, and use a simulated solar spectrum to—ah—‘replay’ the message.”
“Fantastic!” Marc exclaimed.
“You approve?”
“Do I approve?” Marc was almost jigging up and down with excitement. “Why, it’d be wonderful…” His voice trailed away abruptly. “Is that what you meant w
hen you said there was a twelfth book of the Mutine Epics?”
Chart gave a skeletal grin. “Well, of course. The Mandala itself, under everybody’s noses for countless generations.”
“The initiates’ vocabulary,” Morag said. “The key.”
“Did you put him on to this idea?” Marc demanded of her. He was prepared, on the basis of this astonishing insight, to forget everything bad he had ever been told about her. At second-hand, he had never formed a really clear impression of the reasons why she had been so cordially disliked in the enclave during her farmer visit to Yan, and since he personally had no special fondness for the enclave and its people he was all the readier to discount what he had heard.
“I think I helped Gregory towards his conclusion,” Morag said. “But mainly it’s due to his background, his unique pattern of mentation. Do you know much about Gregory’s work?”
Marc hesitated. “Not much. I mean, apart from Hyrax.”
“That again!” Chart spoke with a tinge of disgust. “As though liberating a bunch of serfs were my sole justification for existing! I find it debasing—almost humiliating! Your Dr Lem, for example, only a short while ago, threw my work on Hyrax in my face, and I told him what I think of it, and I’m sure he didn’t pay the least attention. Now listen, young man! You’re a poet! If you can’t understand my philosophy and my methods, then no one can!”
He hunched forward, while Marc prepared himself to listen with maximal attention. He could scarcely believe that he was really here, in Gregory Chart’s ship, being lectured by the great man himself about his art.
And all of a sudden Chart had come alive. The fire behind his eyes spread, as though a gale had picked up a tiny flame and infected a whole forest. His voice crackled with it.
“You will grant, I trust, that the greatest creative force ever to work among intelligent beings—of any species—is the one which makes a culture? That is the force before which we all have to bow: poets, musicians, dramatists, philosophers… The process which evolves, patiently, with endless refinement, the totality into which all else is absorbed: that is the masterpiece of masterpieces! And it’s nothing to do with individuals, except insofar as the time may be ripe for a particular person with a particular gift to leave his imprint on the ephemeral, malleable, fluid constituents of the culture.