The Other

by Matthew Hughes

Imbry was surprised to see genuine outrage in the officer’s face. Taggar was pulling him bodily out of the line of the provost’s man’s approach, saying, “Please pardon us, sir. His mind is affected,” in a far humbler tone than the big man had used among the other members of the Hedevan Traveling Players. Taggar was also careful not to look directly at the angry provost’s man, but kept his eyes on the other’s feet. An instant later, the circuit having finally closed in Imbry’s cerebrum, the fat man adopted the same posture. “Please excuse me,” he murmured.

  “Get out of my sight!” said the Fuldan. “Get back to your own kind!”

  “These things are not generally talked about,” said Malweer.

  “They don’t have to be,” said Ebblin. “Everybody knows.”

  “Everybody,” Imbry countered, “except hapless strangers plumped down in your midst.”

  “I’ve heard that off-worlders can be deeply irregular,” the thin man said.

  Young Wintle said, “It must be strange when everybody’s irregular. Imagine them all walking around, showing each other their . . . discrepancies.”

  “Imagine, though,” said Malweer, “what it would be like to own such a device and to walk freely among the Ideals.”

  “That’ll be enough of that kind of talk,” said Taggar. “We have a show to put on and we haven’t even put the stage together.” He turned to Imbry. “Are you clear now?”

  “I think so,” said the fat man. “Never speak to an Ideal without first being invited to. Don’t look at them. Don’t talk about them in their hearing. Don’t draw unnecessary attention—”

  “And, above all,” the big man said, “don’t touch one, even so much as a brush-by. They have to cleanse themselves, a lengthy and thorough procedure. Don’t touch anything they may use. Often they will incinerate it with gouts of fire.”

  “Understood,” Imbry said. The group began to break up. They had been gathered within the concealment of the troupe’s large pavilion, which had been erected on a piece of waste ground outside Pilger’s Corners. The company had traveled there during the morning after the provost’s officers had come out to collect Imbry, along with Tuchol’s body, and take them back to town. Imbry had been surprised to discover that the buildings at the oasis in the pass contained a communications point. Taggar had used it to notify the authorities of the little man’s death.

  “The place where you found me,” he asked Taggar as they walked back from the provost station to the campsite, “did it also have a communicator?”

  “They all do,” Taggar said. “But we are not to use them except in dire emergency. They are for the Ideals. Anything we use has to be cleansed afterwards. Then the people who cleanse them have to cleanse themselves. They do not like it.”

  “Tuchol lay on the bed in one of the rooms,” Imbry said.

  “He would,” Taggar said. “He delighted in such mischief.” He sighed. “But it does not do to speak ill of the dead.”

  The walk through the streets of Pilger’s Corners, a community of perhaps three thousand inhabitants built around two substantial oases and a scattering of spring-fed ponds, had shown Imbry the position of “oddies” in Fuldan society. At Taggar’s instruction he had copied the big man’s small steps and the way he kept his hands clasped across his midriff, elbows tight against his sides, with head bent groundward and eyes lowered.

  They left the gated yard behind the provost’s station and followed an alley that led to the town’s main square. This was a substantial plaza shaded by towering deo trees planted in the center of the space and watered by a rough stone fountain Imbry assumed was fed by the oasis at the upper end of town.

  The provost’s station and its attached incarcery took up all of one side. Opposite, beyond the fountain and trees, was another large building with broad steps leading up to a pair of heavy wooden doors on each of which was an insignia in dark metal—it reminded Imbry of a stylized wave with a vertical line through it. Standing on the steps were two men, one young, one old, whose hats, baldrics, and pouches were of black cloth. They were in conversation; by Imbry’s reading of their postures and gestures, the younger was deferring to the older. But when he and Taggar appeared, the two black-hats broke off their talk and both watched the two irregulars emerge from the alley.

  When Taggar noticed Imbry staring at the two across the way, he hissed, “Put your head down! If the senior arbiter changes his mind, you’ll be back in the cell.”

  Imbry lowered his gaze and walked beside Taggar in the mincing gait that Fulda apparently required of its irregulars. At first the fat man wondered that they did not crash into the several pedestrians they encountered along the way. The residents of Pilger’s Corners seemed to spend some portion of the day promenading through the streets, standing about in loose groups in the square, or visiting its shops, booths, and outdoor refectories.

  But no collisions occurred. Passersby gave the two men a wide berth, though not without issuing hisses and grumbles and sharp intakes of breath at their passage, especially when Imbry and Taggar came around a corner, taking on-comers by surprise.

  All Fuldans wore the same lack of costume, and the colors of their minimal attire ran the short gamut from light brown to dark. The tan-hatted, Taggar told him, were farmers; they were the majority. The mid-browns were artisans; the slightly darker were shopkeepers and what passed for professionals in Fulda’s egalitarian society. Provost’s men wore the deepest brown, with yellow circles denoting rank. Arbiters wore true black, with rank symbols of silver. Imbry noted that children wore the same colors as their parents. Most occupations were hereditary, he was told, although the College of Arbiters and the Provosts Corps accepted applicants strictly on merit, as determined by formal examinations and field trials. No irregulars were admitted, of course. To them was allotted the profession of entertainer.

  Back at the troupe’s pavilions, after his brief instruction in proper comportment for irregulars, Imbry was put to work arranging chairs in rows in the show pavilion, then assisted with the erection of the portable stage. For the former task, he was required to wear gloves, lest his irregular touch contaminate the seating. Then there were other tasks to be performed: rigging poles and ropes behind the curtain that made a back wall to the stage, so that the rear space could be divided, by more hanging curtains, into small compartments. In each of these, a stool was positioned in a corner, with a small table beside it on which were arranged an assortment of objects, all of which had to be handled by gloves.

  Imbry was not involved in the disposition of these latter materials. Ebblin shooed him away, saying, “You don’t need to deal with this. Go help the young one with the stock.”

  He went out and helped Wintle settle the draft animals along a rope strung between two iron posts fixed firmly into the hard earth at the edge of the waste ground. Nearby, a pipe no thicker than the fat man’s thumb bubbled up water into a shallow depression too small to be called a pond.

  “They’ve drunk and they’ve had their mash,” Wintle said. “Now we brush them down.” He showed Imbry how to fit the strap of the wire-bristled brush over his hand then draw it in long strokes down from the beasts’ ridged backs to their wide bellies, and from their hips to their fetlocks. The animals’ innards rumbled and gurgled as they stood placidly absorbing the grooming, their clubbed tails twitching aimlessly.

  Imbry wanted to explore a point that had been largely glossed over in the group discussion. Youth were often more accepting of unconventional matters than were their elders, so he asked young Wintle, straight out, “The Ideals, why do they all have the same appearance?”

  The question did not so much embarrass the youth as puzzle him. His unusual features pulled together in a manner that reminded Imbry of a dog trying to understand a new command. “Because they’re Ideals,” he said. “That’s how they’re supposed to look.”

  “But how did it come to pass that Ideals are that way?”

  The question plainly flummoxed Wintle. “They’ve always been t
hat way.”

  “No,” said the fat man. “They have made themselves that way. Or their ancestors did, and their descendants have continued the project. They all look so . . . ordinary. What I’m asking is, why?”

  It was a question that, Imbry knew, could be asked on any world whose population had built their civilization around a central idea. Usually, it was best to ask it of an integrator, since such a device was less likely to take offense. It was rarely useful to pose the question to one of the denizens of such a culture, because the most likely answer was some irritated variation on: “Because that’s the only right and proper way to arrange human existence, as you would know if you weren’t a contemptible, benighted foreigner,” accompanied by an invitation to catch the next ship off-world. But Fulda appeared not to possess a connectivity of integrators, and Imbry needed to know the lay of the land because he actively suspected that further ignorant treading on the locals’ obvious prejudices would plunge him into a welter of animosity, perhaps violently expressed.

  But Wintle was no scholar of the Fuldan social dynamic. From what Imbry was able to draw out of him the youth was only vaguely aware that conditions were different on other worlds. But his baseline assumption was that the universe was filled with Ideals, all virtually indistinguishable from each other at a distance of half a dozen paces, although he had heard tell that on other planets, irregulars like him had more freedom.

  “Those must be awfully loose and bawdy places,” he said, stroking the curry down the barbarel’s flank. “Imagine, everybody all just mixed up together. In eating places, even.” He brought the brush back up to the animal’s backbone, shaking his oddly proportioned head in silent wonder.

  “It’s hard to believe,” Imbry said. “Tell me, do you know of anywhere I could find an integrator.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A device that combines ratiocination, communication, and memory.” When Wintle looked at him blankly, Imbry said, “A machine that thinks and talks.”

  The boy’s pendulous ears flapped as he shook his head. “Nuh uh,” he said. “They’re against the law. Arbiters smash them.”

  Imbry was about to put another query when he saw an additional thought bubble to the top of the boy’s mental pool. “I heard once,” he said, “that there are some big machines left over from the mining days that had thinkers in them. Arbiters couldn’t figure out how to get at them so they just left them.”

  “Where are they?” Imbry asked.

  “Over by Fosh, I think. You should ask Malweer.”

  “Where is Fosh?”

  “Other side of the world, I think. This troupe doesn’t go there.”

  Imbry tried again. “If you wanted to conduct research,”—he broke off as Wintle’s confused-canine expression told him that the phrase he had used was unfamiliar—“if you wanted to find information about some subject, where would you go?”

  “I’d ask Malweer. He knows ’most everything.”

  “Yes,” said the fat man, “but suppose he wasn’t handy. Is there a place where information is stored, where people can go and find out things they’d like to know?”

  It took a little more questioning, and a few more wrinklings of Wintle’s canine brow, before the youth understood the thrust of Imbry’s query. He’d heard, he said, of buildings where they had lots of books, and Ideals could go in and read them.

  “Libraries?” Imbry said.

  “I think that’s what they’re called,” the youth said.

  “Is there one here in Pilger’s Corners?”

  “I think so. In the town square. But they are only for Ideals.” He shook a finger in friendly admonition. “Not for us.”

  Like any student of human nature—and success in the professions of thief and forger required a full course of study—Imbry was well aware of the multitude of different ways of organizing and sustaining a social order. Societies had evolved out of kinship groups when unrelated people banded together to apply their common efforts toward securing the essentials of existence: food, shelter, security, companionship. When advancements in knowledge and technology assured that those needs were routinely provided for, a new priority always emerged. With their bellies reliably full, their bodies warm and protected from the elements, and their lives, limbs, and liberties unthreatened, humankind invariably discovered the need for a sense of purpose beyond mere eating and voiding, sleeping and waking. The same questions were inevitably put: What are we here for? Where is the meaning behind all of our deeds and utterances? What gives shape to our lives?

  The answer, no less inevitably, seemed to emerge in the form of an idea, a central principal around which the culture would structure its members’ individual and collective lives. Sometimes the idea was conceived as a deity’s will, expressed through prophecies and visions; sometimes it arose from a philosophical rationale, based on principles derived from sheer intellect or from observations of natural processes; sometimes it came from a calcification of inherited ways and customs, imbued with sanctity from age and habit, long after the initiating spark had been forgotten or clouded in myth.

  Whatever the origin, once an idea obtained a good grip on a collection of minds, once it was continuously reinforced by daily practice and supported by the opinions of the generality, and especially if it rarely met energetic contradiction from competing concepts, it became the universe in which those minds existed. It bent their perceptions, channeled their reasoning, obscured other interpretations to the point of invisibility.

  Such ideas, when they grew among isolated populations, were likely to take on the dignified vestments of inarguable truth. On a small backwater planet like Fulda, where the very notion of cosmopolitanism was unthinkable—Imbry doubted the inhabitants had even retained the word in their lexicon—an idea like Idealism might start out as an interesting landmark by which the culture could navigate their social environment with a firm sense of direction. Given time, though, the landmark would become the environment. No one would remember a time before Idealism had ruled their lives; indeed, after a sufficient succession of generations had lived under its aegis, most could scarcely imagine that such a time had ever existed.

  On some long-ago day, now lost beyond memory, Imbry was sure, a ship had set down on Fulda, bringing with it a small and closely knit population from some other world. Out onto the planet’s surface had marched a determined coterie whose lives were governed by the idea that everything would be so much better if everyone was of much the same size, coloring, conformation. They had probably formed a community of like-mindedness on the foundational domain or secondary world on which the idea of Idealism had arisen. Over a span of generations, they would have been working at reducing physical differences amongst themselves, but always chafing under the ridicule of their neighbors. The practical translating of their beliefs into concrete action, especially if it extended to the murder of irregular infants or surgical procedures forced upon waverers, might even have been outlawed.

  They had chosen exile to Fulda, where there had been room to flex their conceptual elbows. It was doubtful that there had been any substantial human population when they arrived, the planet offering little in the way of economic opportunity or spectacular vistas to thrill the artistic soul. A desert planet tended to attract solitaries and hermits, who by their nature would have been sparsely distributed and deliberately unorganized. The tightly organized Ideals, full of zeal, would have had little trouble dealing with any opposition. They would have begun by facilitating the pioneers’ passage off-world; when that process had reduced the initial inhabitants to a handful of recalcitrants who refused all reasonable inducements to relocate, the newcomers would have had no trouble convincing themselves that harsher methods were justified. This world was to be for the Ideals and none but.

  The part of the picture that surprised Imbry was that enough regressive genes could still exist among the Fuldans to have produced tiny-headed Ebblin and tiny-handed Thelia, Wintle the dog-faced boy, and spindly Malweer. Bu
t his grounding in genetic science was that of an uninterested layman, and he realized that it was possible that their deformities were the result of uterine failures during gestation. He would have wagered that Taggar’s hyper-muscularity was a glandular imbalance. Shan-Pei, however, was certainly a genetic sport—perhaps the result of a collision between a random cosmic ray penetrating through Fulda’s thick atmosphere to intersect precisely with one of the fur-covered woman’s parents’ chromosomes.

  In any case, the fat man had by now seen enough to grasp at the essentials of the Fuldan social dynamic. Here was a sequestered population of persons among whom variations in physical appearance were so slight as to be unnoticeable except on close examination. As he had traversed Pilger’s Corners from the provost station to the Hedevan show tents, he had sneaked enough peeks at the town’s inhabitants to know that they were all of the same height, weight, coloring, physique, and physiognomy, save that the males were a little larger than the females.

  A Fuldan Ideal was of medium height and medium build, light brown in skin tone and hair coloring, with hazel eyes. Facial conformation was so balanced that no one feature dominated, but all were in such relative harmony that the result could not be called either handsome or its opposite. Their faces were merely bland. The men were smoothly muscled, neither deep nor narrow chested. The women’s breasts were at the precise midpoint between ample and inconsequential. Both sexes were somewhat slim hipped, both wore their hair cut straight across at the level of the earlobe, and both were completely depilated below the neck.

  All of this Imbry would have found mildly interesting if it had been brought to his attention in a periodical or as a traveler’s tale carried back to Olkney by some acquaintance who had happened to visit a strange little backwater where the locals had curious standards and customs. It was another matter altogether to find himself marooned in this unprepossessing and frankly primitive planet—not even a connectivity of integrators!—and, worse, to have been made a member of a despised minority. Worse yet, he had been implicated as a suspect in a murder. His only good fortune so far had been that the corpse had not been that of an Ideal. If it had been, his treatment at the hands of the provost would almost certainly have been much rougher.