But if you think that’s odd, keep going. There is a perfect, rationally designed male urinal, right here in this room—less than a meter away—but for some reason, no male human will admit to ever having used it for that purpose. That would somehow desecrate it, soil it. Officially it is reserved for saliva, nasal mucus, toothpaste spit-up, beard-hairs, blood, assorted skin-paints worn by females, and the truly disgusting things humans seem to have to rinse off their hands all the time. Needless to say, it too must have its water-temperature laboriously reset by guess with each use.
Above it, on the wall, hangs another curious thing: a cabinet designed to spill its contents. The spice-rack in the last room, meant to hold items of uniform size and shape, has retaining walls for them—but these shelves, intended to hold items of varied size and shape, do not. And they are always too small and shallow to hold what is required; the overflow goes under the sink where it can grow mold faster.
Let’s go back to the commode. Does it come with a reading lamp? No? Not even a magazine rack? Good God, Spock, are these creatures savages?
There are stereo speakers built in, surely? Power and datafeeds for a laptop? At least tell me there’s a built-in deodorizer…
Let’s stop. It’s time to beam back up. These hominids may have developed some clever technology—but they are obviously not bright enough to have given the slightest thought to applying it to their own most basic personal comfort, and so they cannot possibly be regarded as sentient.
We’ll check back in another century or so. It’s possible yoomins are going through some sort of temporary cyclical madness—every adolescent species has its Crazy Years.
Yoomins Reconsidered
To:
Kames T. Jerk, Commander,
Starship Exitprize
From:
Academician Npolfz Tuvefou,
University of Aldeberan
Subject:
Your Report on Sol III
Dear Captain:
I don’t think you’re being entirely fair to the yoomins of Sol III. I’ve read your recent assessment of their intelligence, as exemplified by the personal-comfort technology found in their fuel-intake and -exhaust chambers, and I cannot fault your data. But I think you’ve missed a subtle point, which colors your conclusion.
There is about yoomins a quality so profoundly strange that it renders questions of intelligence or stupidity simply irrelevant. I have spent some time in that sector of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud—not by choice, of course; a breakdown—and ask you to believe that this is true, however improbable it may seem:
Yoomins believe at their core that LIFE IS NOT TOUGH ENOUGH.
A primary example: like any sentient species, they recognized a need to transmit information nonverbally with high reliability over distance. Like most, they developed a symbol system: in their case, dark stains on leaves of whitened plant matter. (An unstable medium—but then their lives are short.) They called theirs an “alphabet.”
So far so good. But yoomins believe life is not hard enough; they could not stop there. The most advanced tribe of them developed not two but three alphabets, almost but not quite identical—called “upper case,” “lower case,” and “script”—for absolutely no reason at all. These yoomins require their young to master all three, and an endless series of self-contradictory rules for when each may/must be used. The largest tribe of yoomins, on the other hand, uses an alphabet that has endured, essentially unchanged, for millennia…which contains hundreds of characters, of surpassing complexity, and is nearly impossible for most yoomins (even of that tribe) to learn, write, type, or translate.
Consider language itself. The purpose of language is to encode reality and communicate useful observations regarding it. Obviously, the more languages you construct, the more ways you have of looking at reality; integrate enough of them, and the noise should filter out, leaving a refined approximation. Yoomins have a reassuring plethora of languages—and much urgent reason to want to communicate with one another. BUT ALMOST NO YOOMIN LEARNS MORE THAN ONE LANGUAGE. Bitter emotional debates often rage on whether it should be permissible for the young to be schooled in as many as two. This requires that every message between different tribes be laboriously translated by a single freak-expert, whose work can not practically be checked. Attempts at establishing a planetary pidgin—the very first sign of a civilization—have been made, but never seriously; yet yoomins maintain a planetary civilization. They do not believe life is hard enough.
The yoomin ecosystem teems with substances containing neurochemicals which induce pleasure in them. Nearly all yoomins show clear need for at least some such pleasure, above that provided by simple successful survival. Most of these chemicals have societally-damaging side effects, some great, some small. Dealing with those would be a large but entirely manageable problem.
But yoomins don’t think life is tough enough. Their response is to absolutely forbid use of any such substance, punishing violators with death, torture, imprisonment and disgrace. I swear. Excepted, of course, are substances that do not make a yoomin feel good enough to arouse anyone else’s envy (E.g., “sugar,” “chocolate,” “caffeine”). But the only other exception—one made almost universally around the planet—is for the single substance which demonstrably and unmistakably has the most destructive effects (ethanol). All substances in between tend to be demonized in direct proportion to their relative harmlessness, and the strength of the user’s need for them.
This clearly does not work: produces a daily spectacle of slaughter, waste, corruption and degradation which has continued for several centuries. They simply do not see it—acquire a blank look when you point it out.
Yoomins reproduce sexually, and at high efficiency. At present, they are confined to a single planet (for no explicable reason; apparently by choice), and thus suffer an overpopulation problem so intense it must be immediately apparent to the meanest intelligence among them. They are extremely blessed by nature in that a) contraception itself is trivially simple for them, and b) there are a number of alternative sexual recreations that offer no possibility of impregnation and are even more pleasurable than the procreative act itself. So what do yoomins do? They deify ignorance. They do their level best—knowing in advance that they cannot possibly succeed—to ensure that their young learn nothing about sex (not even simple hygiene) for as long as possible. Indeed, sexual ignorance in children is given the special name “innocence,” and considered not only a virtue, but the ultimate virtue. Yoomins deliberately go to enormous trouble to guarantee that their own young will begin their sex lives incompetently, with maximum possible emotional trauma, JUST as they are most fertile.
Recently yoomins developed technology which makes unintended conception a correctable mistake, long before a developing fetus could possibly possess a single functioning nerve cell or pain receptor—and so now, inevitably, the most revered and popular religious leader in the history of their planet tells them such technology is evil. He himself is a celibate. Life is nowhere NEAR tough enough for the inhabitants of Sol III.
Yoomins made a terrible historical mistake. They destroyed or tamed every single predator that threatened them, from sabretooth to smallpox, and gained control over most natural catastrophes—long before they were emotionally prepared to do without them. They have become too accustomed to the regular sound of ringing alarm bells in their heads, and so will manufacture emergency if none arises naturally. In between emergencies, they fantasize about them. They are addicted to fear, and for some reason cannot admit it. They are neurologically wired up to deal with a more hostile environment than presently presents itself…and are undone by the lack of competition. They turn their own intelligence to making life difficult enough for their comfort, for their innate sense of the rightness of things.
Thus, the brighter they are, the stupider they appear to be.
It is what makes them happy. We can judge it only as art. And they are clearly great artists…currently shaping thei
r greatest collaborative creation yet together, a masterpiece known as The Crazy Years.
BY ANY OTHER NAME
There’s winds out on the ocean
Blowin’ where they choose.
The winds got no emotion:
They don’t know the blues.
—traditional
CHAPTER ONE
Excerpt from the Journal of Isham Stone
I hadn’t meant to shoot the cat.
I hadn’t meant to shoot anything, for that matter—the pistol at my hip was strictly defensive armament at the moment. But my adrenals were on overtime and my peripheral vision was straining to meet itself behind my head—when something appeared before me with no warning at all my subconscious sentries opted for the Best Defense. I was down and rolling before I knew I’d fired, through a doorway I hadn’t known was there.
I fetched up with a heart-stopping crash against the foot of a staircase just inside the door. The impact dislodged something on the first-floor landing; it rolled heavily down the steps and sprawled across me: the upper portion of a skeleton, largely intact from the sixth vertebra up. As I lurched in horror to my feet, long-dead muscle and cartilage crumbled at last, and random bones skittered across the dusty floor. Three inches above my left elbow, someone was playing a drum-roll with knives.
Cautiously I hooked an eye around the doorframe, at about knee-level. The smashed remains of what had recently been gray-and-white Persian tom lay against a shattered fire hydrant whose faded red surface was spattered with brighter red and less appealing colors. Overworked imagination produced the odor of singed meat.
I’m as much cat-people as the One-Sleeved Mandarin, and three shocks in quick succession, in the condition I was in, were enough to override all the iron discipline of Collaci’s training. Eyes stinging, I stumbled out onto the sidewalk, uttered an unspellable sound, and pumped three slugs into a wrecked ’82 Buick lying on its right side across the street.
I was pretty badly rattled—only the third slug hit the exposed gas tank. But it was magnesium, not lead: the car went up with a very satisfactory roar and the prettiest fireball you ever saw. The left rear wheel was blown high in the air: it soared gracefully over my head, bounced off a fourth-floor fire escape and came down flat and hard an inch behind me. Concrete buckled.
When my ears had stopped ringing and my eyes uncrossed, I became aware that I was rigid as a statue. So much for catharsis, I thought vaguely, and relaxed with an effort that hurt all over.
The cat was still dead.
I saw almost at once why he had startled me so badly. The tobacconist’s display window from which he had leaped was completely shattered, so my subconscious sentries had incorrectly tagged it as one of the rare unbroken ones. Therefore, they reasoned, the hurtling object must be in fact emerging from the open door just beyond the window. Anything coming out a doorway that high from the ground just had to be a Musky, and my hand is much quicker than my eye.
Now that my eye had caught up, of course, I realized that I couldn’t possibly track a Musky by eye. Which was exactly why I’d been keyed up enough to waste irreplaceable ammo and give away my position in the first place. Carlson had certainly made life complicated for me. I hoped I could manage to kill him slowly.
This was no consolation to the cat. I looked down at my Musky-gun, and found myself thinking of the day I got it, just three months past. The first gun I had ever owned myself, symbol of man’s estate, mine for as long as it took me to kill Carlson, and for as long afterwards as I lived. After my father had presented it to me publicly, and formally charged me with the avenging of the human race, the friends and neighbors—and dark-eyed Alia—had scurried safely inside for the ceremonial banquet. But my father took me aside. We walked in silence through the West Forest to Mama’s grave, and through the trees the setting sun over West Mountain looked like a knothole in the wall of Hell. Dad turned to me at last, pride and paternal concern fighting for control of his ebony features, and said, “Isham…Isham, I wasn’t much older than you when I got my first gun. That was long ago and far away, in a place called Montgomery—things were different then. But some things never change.” He tugged an earlobe reflectively, and continued, “Phil Collaci has taught you well, but sometimes he’d rather shoot first and ask directions later. Isham, you just can’t go blazing away indiscriminately. Not ever. You hear me?”
The crackling of the fire around the ruined Buick brought me back to the present. Damn, you called it again Dad, I thought as I shivered there on the sidewalk. You can’t go blazing away indiscriminately.
Not even here in New York City.
It was getting late, and my left arm ached abominably where Grey Brother had marked me—I reminded myself sharply that I was here on business. I had no wish to pass a night in any city, let alone this one, so I continued on up the street, examining every building I passed with extreme care. If Carlson had ears, he now knew someone was in New York, and he might figure out why. I was on his home territory—every alleyway and manhole was a potential ambush.
There were stores and shops of every conceivable kind, commerce more fragmented and specialized than I had ever seen before. Some shops dealt only in a single item. Some I could make no sense of at all. What the hell is an “rko”?
I kept to the sidewalk where I could. I told myself I was being foolish, that I was no less conspicuous to Carlson or a Musky than if I’d stood on second base at the legendary Shea Stadium, and that the street held no surprise tomcats. But I kept to the sidewalk where I could. I remember Mama—a long time ago—telling me not to go in the street or the monsters would get me.
They got her.
Twice I was forced off the curb, once by a subway entrance and once by a supermarket. Dad had seen to it that I had the best plugs Fresh Start had to offer, but they weren’t that good. Both times I hurried back to the sidewalk and was thoroughly disgusted with my pulse rate. But I never looked over my shoulder. Collaci says there’s no sense being scared when it can’t help you—and the fiasco with the cat proved him right.
It was early afternoon, and the same sunshine that was warming the forests and fields and work-zones of Fresh Start, my home, seemed to chill the air here, accentuating the barren emptiness of the ruined city. Silence and desolation were all around me as I walked, bleached bones and crumbling brick. Carlson had been efficient, all right, nearly as efficient as the atomic bomb folks used to be so scared of once. It seemed as though I were in some immense Devil’s Autoclave, that ignored filth and grime but grimly scrubbed out life of any kind.
Wishful thinking, I decided, and shook my head to banish the fantasy. If the city had been truly lifeless, I’d be approaching Carlson from uptown—I would never have had to detour as far south as the Lincoln Tunnel, and my left arm would not have ached so terribly. Grey Brother is extremely touchy about his territorial rights.
I decided to replace the makeshift dressing over the torn biceps. I didn’t like the drumming insistence of the pain: it kept me awake but interfered with my concentration. I ducked into the nearest store that looked defensible, and found myself sprawled on the floor behind an overturned table, wishing mightily that it weren’t so flimsy.
Something had moved.
Then I rose sheepishly to my feet, holstering my heater and rapping my subconscious sentries sharply across the knuckles for the second time in half an hour. My own face looked back at me from the grimy mirror that ran along one whole wall, curly black hair in tangles, wide lips stretched back in what looked just like a grin. It was a grin. I hadn’t realized how bad I looked.
Dad had told me a lot about Civilization, before the Exodus, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand it. A glance around this room raised more questions than it answered. On my left, opposite the long mirror, were a series of smaller mirrors that paralleled it for three-quarters of its length, with odd-looking chairs before them. Something like armchairs made of metal, padded where necessary, with levers to raise and lower them. On my r
ight, below the longer mirror, were a lot of smaller, much plainer wooden chairs, in a tight row broken occasionally by strange frameworks from which lengths of rotting fabric dangled. I could only surmise that this was some sort of arcane narcissist’s paradise, where men of large ego would come, remove their clothing, recline in luxuriously upholstered seats, and contemplate their own magnificence. The smaller, shabbier seats, too low to afford a decent view, no doubt represented the cut-rate or second-class accommodations.
But what was the significance of the cabinets between the larger chairs and the wall, laden with bottles and plastic containers and heathen appliances? And why were all the skeletons in the room huddled together in the middle of the floor, as though their last seconds of life had been spent frantically fighting over something?
Something gleamed in the bone-heap, and I saw what the poor bastards had died fighting for, and knew what kind of place this had been. The contested prize was a straight razor.
My father had spent eighteen of my twenty years telling me why I ought to hate Wendell Carlson, and in the past few days I’d acquired nearly as many reasons of my own. I intended to put them in Carlson’s obituary.
A wave of weariness passed over me. I moved to one of the big chairs, pressed gingerly down on the seat to make sure no cunning mechanism awaited my mass to trigger it (Collaci’s training again—if Teach’ ever gets to Heaven, he’ll check it for booby traps), took off my rucksack and sat down. As I unrolled the bandage around my arm I glanced at myself in the mirror and froze, struck with wonder. An infinite series of mes stretched out into eternity, endless thousands of Isham Stones caught in that frozen second of time that holds endless thousands of possible futures, on the point of some unimaginable cusp. I knew it was simply the opposed mirrors, the one before me slightly askew, and could have predicted the phenomenon had I thought about it—but I was not expecting it and had never seen anything like it in my life. All at once I was enormously tempted to sit back, light a joint from the first-aid kit in my rucksack, and meditate awhile. I wondered what Alia was doing right now, right at this moment. Hell, I could kill Carlson at twilight, and sleep in his bed—or hole up here and get him tomorrow, or the next day. When I was feeling better.
By Any Other Name Page 29
