by Anthology
“What age are you talking about?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Sexual feelings don’t begin until a certain age, do they?”
“Don’t they? What would you say the age is, on the average?”
“Oh—depends on the indi—but you did say ‘average,’ didn’t you? Let’s put it around eight. Nine maybe.”
“Wrong. Wait till you have some of your own, you’ll find out. I’d put it at two or three minutes. I’d be willing to bet it existed a whole lot before that, too. By some weeks.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“I know you don’t,” said Vorhidin. “‘Strue all the same. What about the parent of the opposite sex?”
“Now, that would have to wait for a stage of consciousness capable of knowing the difference.”
“Wel-l-l—you’re not as wrong as usual,” he said, but he said it kindly. “But you’d be amazed at how early that can be. They can smell the difference long before they can see it. A few days, a week.”
“I never knew.”
“I don’t doubt that a bit. Now, let’s forget everything you’ve seen here. Let’s pretend you’re back on Lethe and I ask you, what would be the effects on a culture if each individual had immediate and welcome access to all the others?”
“Sexual access?” Charli made a laugh, a nervous sort of sound. “Sexual excess, I’d call it.”
“There’s no such thing,” said the big man flatly. “Depending on who you are and what sex, you can do it only until you can’t do it any more, or you can keep on until finally nothing happens. One man might get along beautifully with some mild kind of sexual relief twice a month or less. Another might normally look for it eight, nine times a day.”
“I’d hardly call that normal.”
“I would. Unusual it might be, but it’s 100 per cent normal for the guy who has it, long as it isn’t pathological. By which I mean, capacity is capacity, by the cupful, by the horsepower, by the flight ceiling. Man or machine, you do no harm by operating within the parameters of design. What does do harm—lots of it, and some of the worst kind—is guilt and a sense of sin, where the sin turns out to be some sort of natural appetite. I’ve read case histories of boys who have suicided because of a nocturnal emission, or because they yielded to the temptation to masturbate after five, six weeks of self-denial—a denial, of course, that all by itself makes them preoccupied, absolutely obsessed by something that should have no more importance than clearing the throat. (I wish I could say that this kind of horror story lives only in the ancient scripts, but on many a world right this minute, it still goes on.)
“This guilt and sin thing is easier for some people to understand if you take it outside the area of sex. There are some religious orthodoxies which require a very specific diet, and the absolute exclusion of certain items. Given enough indoctrination for long enough, you can keep a man eating only (we’ll say) ‘flim’ while ‘flam’ is forbidden. He’ll get along on thin moldy flim and live half starved in a whole warehouse full of nice fresh flam. You can make him ill—even kill him, if you have the knack—just by convincing him that the flim he just ate was really flam in disguise. Or you can drive him psychotic by slipping him suggestions until he acquires a real taste for flam and gets a supply and hides it and nibbles at it secretly every time he fights temptation and loses.
“So imagine the power of guilt when it isn’t a flim-and-flam kind of manufactured orthodoxy you’re violating, but a deep pressure down in the cells somewhere. It’s as mad, and as dangerous, as grafting in an ethical-guilt structure which forbids or inhibits yielding to the need for the B-vitamin complex or potassium.”
“Oh, but,” Charli interrupted, “now you’re talking about vital necessities—survival factors.”
“I sure as hell am,” said Vorhidin in Charli’s own idiom, and grinned a swift and hilarious—and very accurate—imitation of Charli’s flash-beacon smile. “Now it’s time to trot out some of the things I mentioned before, things that can hurt you much more than ignorance—the things you know that ain’t so.” He laughed suddenly. “This is kind of fun, you know? I’ve been to a lot of worlds, and some are miles and years different from others in a thousand ways: but this thing I’m about to demonstrate, this particular shut-the-eyes, shut-the-brains conversation you can get anywhere you go. Are you ready? Tell me, then: what’s wrong with incest? I take it back—you know me. Don’t tell me. Tell some stranger, some fume-sniffer or alcohol addict in a spaceport bar.” He put out both hands, the fingers so shaped that one could all but see light glisten from the imaginary glass he held. He said in a slurred voice, “Shay, shtranger, whut’s a-wrong wit’ in-shest, hm?” He closed one eye and rolled the other toward Charli.
Charli stopped to think. “You mean, morally, or what?”
“Let’s skip that whole segment. Right and wrong depend on too many things from one place to another, although I have some theories of my own. No—let’s be sitting in this bar and agree that incest is just awful, and go on from there. What’s really wrong with it?”
“You breed too close, you get faulty offspring. Idiots and dead babies without heads and all that.”
“I knew it! I knew it!” crowed the big Vexveltian. “Isn’t it wonderful? From the rocky depths of a Stone Age culture through the brocades and knee-breeches sort of grand opera civilizations all the way out to the computer technocracies, where they graft electrodes into their heads and shunt their thinking into a box—you ask that question and you get that answer. It’s something everybody just knows. You don’t have to look at the evidence.”
“Where do you go for evidence?”
“To dinner, for one place, where you’ll eat idiot pig or feeble-minded cow. Any livestock breeder will tell you that, once you have a strain you want to keep and develop, you breed father to daughter and to granddaughter, and then brother to sister. You keep that up indefinitely until the desirable trait shows up recessive, and you stop it there. But it might never show up recessive. In any case, it’s rare indeed when anything goes wrong in the very first generation; but you in the bar, there, you’re totally convinced that it will. And are you prepared to say that every mental retard is the product of an incestuous union? You’d better not, or you’ll hurt the feelings of some pretty nice people. That’s a tragedy that can happen to anybody, and I doubt there’s any more chance of it between related parents than there is with anyone else.
“But you still don’t see the funniest . . . or maybe it’s just the oddest part of that thing you know that just ain’t so. Sex is a pretty popular topic on most worlds. Almost every aspect of it that is ever mentioned has nothing to do with procreation. For every mention of pregnancy or childbirth, I’d say there are hundreds which deal only with the sex act itself. But mention incest, and the response always deals with offspring. Always! To consider and discuss a pleasure or love relationship between blood relatives, you’ve apparently got to make some sort of special mental effort that nobody, anywhere, seems able to do easily—some not at all.”
“I have to admit I never made it. But then—what is wrong with incest, with or without pregnancy?”
“Aside from moral considerations, you mean. The moral consideration is that it’s a horrifying thought, and it’s a horrifying thought because it always has been. Biologically speaking, I’d say there’s nothing wrong with it. Nothing. I’d go even further, with Dr. Phelvelt—ever hear of him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He was a biological theorist who could get one of his books banned on worlds that had never censored anything before—even on worlds which had science and freedom of research and freedom of speech as the absolute keystones of their whole structure. Anyway, Phelvelt had a very special kind of mind, always ready to take the next step no matter where it is, without insisting that it’s somewhere where it isn’t. He thought well, he wrote well, and he had a vast amount of knowledge outside his specialty and a real knack for unearthing what he happe
ned not to know. And he called that sexual tension between blood relatives a survival factor.”
“How did he come to that?”
“By a lot of separate paths which came together in the same place. Everybody knows (this one is so!) that there are evolutionary pressures which make for changes in a species. Not much (before Phelvelt) had been written about stabilizing forces. But don’t you see, inbreeding is one of them?”
“Not offhand, I don’t.”
“Well, look at it, man! Take a herd animal as a good example. The bull covers his cows, and when they deliver heifers and the heifers grow up, he covers them too. Sometimes there’s a third and even a fourth generation of them before he gets displaced by a younger bull. And all that while, the herd characteristics are purified and reinforced. You don’t easily get animals with slightly different metabolisms which might tend to wander away from the feeding ground the others were using. You won’t get high-bottom cows which would necessitate Himself bringing something to stand on when he came courting.” Through Charli’s shout of laughter he continued, “So there you have it—stabilization, purification, greater survival value—all resulting from the pressure to breed in.”
“I see, I see. And the same thing would be true of lions or fish or tree toads, or—”
“Or any animal. A lot of things have been said about Nature, that she’s implacable, cruel, wasteful and so on. I like to think she’s—reasonable. I concede that she reaches that state cruelly, at times, and wastefully and all the rest. But she has a way of coming up with the pragmatic solution, the one that works. To build in a pressure which tends to standardize and purify a successful stage, and to call in the exogene, the infusion of fresh blood, only once in several generations—that seems to me most reasonable.”
“More so,” Charli said, “than what we’ve always done, when you look at it that way. Every generation a new exogene, the blood kept churned up, each new organism full of pressures which haven’t had a chance with the environment.”
“I suppose,” said Vorhidin, “you could argue that the incest taboo is responsible for the restlessness that pulled mankind out of the caves, but that’s a little too simplistic for me. I’d have preferred a mankind that moved a little more slowly, a little more certainly, and never fell back. I think the ritual exogamy that made inbreeding a crime and ‘deceased wife’s sister’ a law against incest is responsible for another kind of restlessness.”
He grew very serious. “There’s a theory that certain normal habit patterns should be allowed to run their course. Take the sucking reflex, for example. It has been said that infants who have been weaned too early plague themselves all their lives with oral activity—chewing on straws, smoking intoxicants in pipes, drinking out of bottle by preference, nervously manipulating the lips, and so on. With that as an analogy, you may look again at the restlessness of mankind all through his history. Who but a gaggle of frustrates, never in their lives permitted all the ways of love within the family, could coin such a concept as ‘motherland’ and give their lives to it and for it? There’s a great urge to love Father, and another to topple him. Hasn’t humanity set up its beloved Fathers, its Big Brothers, loved and worshiped and given and died for them, rebelled and killed and replaced them? A lot of them richly deserved it, I concede, but it would have been better to have done it on its own merits and not because they were nudged by a deep-down, absolutely sexual tide of which they could not speak because they had learned that it was unspeakable.
“The same sort of currents flow within the family unit. So-called ‘sibling rivalry’ is too well known to be described, and the frequency of bitter quarreling between siblings is, in most cultures and their literature, a sort of cliché. Only a very few psychologists have dared to put forward the obvious explanation that, more often than not, these frictions are inverted love feelings, well salted with horror and guilt. It’s a pattern that makes conflict between siblings all but a certainty, and it’s a problem which, once stated, describes its own solution. . . . Have you ever read Vexworth? No? You should—I think you’d find him fascinating. Ecologist; in his way quite as much of a giant as Phelvelt.”
“Ecologist—that has something to do with life and environment, right?”
“Ecology has everything to do with life and environment; it studies them as reciprocals, as interacting and mutually controlling forces. It goes without saying that the main aim and purpose of any life form is optimum survival; but ‘optimum survival’ is a meaningless term without considering the environment in which it has to happen. As the environment changes, the organism has to change its ways and means, even its basic design. Human beings are notorious for changing their environment, and in most of our history in most places, we have made these changes without ecological considerations. This is disaster, every time. This is overpopulation, past the capabilities of producing food and shelter enough. This is the rape of irreplaceable natural resources. This is the contamination of water supplies. And it is also the twisting and thwarting of psychosexual needs in the emotional environment.
“Vexvelt was founded by those two, Charli—Phelvelt and Vexworth—and is named for them. As far as I know it is the only culture ever devised on ecological lines. Our sexual patterns derive from the ecological base and are really only a very small part of our structure. Yet for that one aspect of our lives, we are avoided and shunned and pretty much unmentionable.”
It took a long time for Charli to be able to let these ideas in, and longer for him to winnow and absorb them. But all the while he lived surrounded by beauty and fulfillment, by people, young and old, who were capable of total concentration on art and learning and building and processing, people who gave to each other and to their land and air and water just a little more than they took. He finished his survey largely because he had started it; for a while he was uncertain of what he would do with it.
When at length he came to Vorhidin and said he wanted to stay on Vexvelt, the big man smiled, but he shook his head. “I know you want to, Charli—but do you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” He looked out at the dark bole of one of the Vexveltian poplars; Tyng was there, like a flower, an orchid. “It’s more than that,” said Charli, “more than my wanting to be a Vexveltian. You need me.”
“We love you,” Vorhidin said simply. “But—need?”
“If I went back,” said Charli Bux, “and Terratu got its hands on my survey, what do you think would become of Vexvelt?”
“You tell me.”
“First Terratu would come to trade, and then others, and then others; and then they would fight each other, and fight you . . . you need someone here who knows this, really knows it, and who can deal with it when it starts. It will start, you know, even without my survey; sooner or later someone will be able to do what I did—a shipment of feldspar, a sheet of pure metal. They will destroy you.”
“They will never come near us.”
“You think not. Listen: no matter how the other worlds disapprove, there is one force greater: greed.”
“Not in this case, Charli. And this is what I want you to be able to understand, all the way down to your cells. Unless you do, you can never live here. We are shunned, Charli. If you had been born here, that would not matter so much to you. If you throw in your lot with us, it would have to be a total commitment. But you should not make such a decision without understanding how completely you will be excluded from everything else you have ever known.”
“What makes you think I don’t know it now?”
“You say we need defending. You say other-world traders will exploit us. That only means you don’t understand. Charli: listen to me. Go back to Terratu. Make the strongest presentation you can for trade with Vexvelt. See how they react. Then you’ll know—then you can decide.”
“And aren’t you afraid I might be right, and because of me, Vexvelt will be robbed and murdered?”
And Vorhidin shook his big head, smiling, and said, “Not one bit, Charli B
ux. Not one little bit.”
So Charli went back, and saw (after a due delay) the Archive Master, and learned what he learned, and came out and looked about him at his home world and, through that, at all the worlds like it; and then he went to the secret place where the Vexveltian ship was moored, and it opened to him. Tyng was there, Tamba, and Vorhidin. Charli said, “Take me home.”
In the last seconds before they took the Drive jump, and he could look through the port at the shining face of Terratu for the last time in his life, Charli said, “Why? Why? How did human beings come to hate this one thing so much that they would rather die insane and in agony than accept it? How did it happen, Vorhidin?”
“I don’t know,” said the Vexveltian.
Afterword
And now you know what sort of a science fiction story this is, and perhaps something about science fiction stories that you didn’t know before.
I have always been fascinated by the human mind’s ability to think itself to a truth, and then to take that one step more (truly the basic secret of all human progress) and the inability of so many people to learn the trick. Case in point: “We mean to get that filth off the news-stands and out of the bookstores.” Ask why, and most such crusaders will simply point at the “filth” and wonder that you asked. But a few will take that one step more: “Because youngsters might get their hands on it.” That satisfies most, but ask: “And suppose they do?” a still smaller minority will think it through to: “Because it’s bad for them.” Ask again: “In what way is it bad for them?” and a handful can reach this: “It will arouse them.” By now you’ve probably run out of crusaders, but if there are a couple left, ask them, “How does being aroused harm a child?” and if you can get them to take that one more step, they will have to take it out of the area of emotional conviction and into the area of scientific research. Such studies are available, and invariably they show that such arousement is quite harmless—indeed, there is something abnormal about anyone who is not or cannot be so aroused. The only possible harm that can result comes not from the sexual response itself but from the guilt-making and punitive attitude of the social environment—most of all that part of it which is doing the crusading.
