“Easily, Colonel,” Helton said. “We’ve plenty of inflatables, so we can cover it all completely and cushion the gear enough to not disturb so much as a speck of dust.”
“Good,” O’Bannon said. “What about your quarantine cases?”
Helton smiled and took a slug from his glass. “They’re the ones that’ll do the packing,” he said.
O’Bannon nodded. “Good thinking,” he said as he walked back to his bunk and sat down. “Let’s see; that will be 0900 on Saturday. I’d better screen McGraw tomorrow and tell him we’re coming. Wouldn’t look good if he were off chasing skirts when we arrive.”
“I just arrived,” Holloway said to the image in the screen. “Got to talk to you about some things. How about after dinner?”
Ruth van Riebeek moved into the pickup range, alongside Gerd. “Why don’t you just come over here for dinner. Jack?” she said. “You probably don’t feel like cooking, anyway, after coming all the way down from Fuzzy Valley.”
Jack was about to accept when he saw two more women in the background, setting the big table in one end of the van Riebeek living room; Lynne Andrews, slender and blonde, and a tall brunette that he couldn’t recall having seen before. Confound it! This was confidential stuff. He started to make an excuse. “Well—uh—” he began. “I don’t want to impose…”
“Nonsense,” Ruth said. “We’re doing a whacking big veldbeest roast. There’s plenty—even if you’d brought a platoon of Marines with you.”
That did it. No graceful way to back out, now. Just have to see how it works out. We don’t have to be there until day after tomorrow, anyway. “Okay,” he said. “Let me clean up my screen messages, here, and say hello to the kids. Then I’ll be along—say twenty or thirty minutes?”
Ivan Bowlby raised his handkerchief to his nose, as if to protest the acrid smell of stale tobacco smoke that filled The Bitter End, and sniffed. “I have to have better information than this, Joseph,” Bowlby said, “or I can’t go on paying you to act as go-between.”
The man in the hat smiled cryptically. “Mr. Weisberg, if you please, Mr. Bowlby. I prefer Mr. Weisberg to the familiar. We are both gentlemen doing business together, are we not?”
Bowlby looked uncomfortable. “Whatever you like,” he said. “The point is that my client will not pay for this sort of information. It’s no better than office gossip, really.”
Joseph Weisberg smiled again and spread his hands. “It’s what she is telling me, Mr. Bowlby, and that is what you hired me for—to get the information from the girl and pass it on to you. As I remember, your reasons had to do with your own anonymity and my being new on Zarathustra. I recall nothing in our arrangement regarding the—ah—quality of what I bring to you, which consideration, I’m sure you will admit, is a highly subjective matter at the best.”
“Very well,” Bowlby conceded. “We’ll let it slide as it is for a few more weeks. If I don’t get some highly confidential data, we’ll just have to terminate our deal.”
“Perhaps,” Weisberg said, “if I could speak with your buyer, he could give me a better notion of what he’s after. Some specifics would be of great assistance.”
Bowlby made a quick, irritable movement of his head.
“Out of the question!” he snapped. “My buyer—as you put it—requires even more anonymity than myself in this.”
Weisberg shrugged. “There are ways to preserve it,” he said. “I don’t have to be introduced to him to discuss the matter.”
Neither of them had noticed the short blonde with the cascading curly hair who had slowly eased her way along the bar to a point from which she could overhear the conversation while appearing to fiddle with her drink and watch the crowd in the front of The Bitter End. Bowlby she recognized easily enough. His entertainment agency handled all her bookings. But she could not recall having ever seen the man in the hat before.
Jack Holloway could not recall having seen the tall brunette before, even after he had been introduced to her.
“Miss Bell is a sociologist from Company Science Center,” Gerd was saying. “She’s doing a comparison study on Fuzzies.”
All Jack could think of was that he had to talk to Gerd and Ruth privately, and he couldn’t think of any unobtrusive way to handle it, so far.
“I’m afraid I’ve just scratched the surface, here,” Liana Bell was saying. “Fuzzy social structures are, I feel, far more complex than we might have thought.”
“How so, Miss Bell?” Jack asked. “We’ve been around Fuzzies for something over a year, now. I would think we’d have a pretty clear idea about such things.”
They were sitting in a relaxed group around a gigantic wooden slab, sliced whole from the bole of a pool-ball tree, that served as a coffee table in the van Riebeek living room. Dinner had made Jack feel alive again; he hadn’t realized how tired he was until he walked across Holloway’s Run from his bungalow to the van Riebeeks’. He got out his pipe and began to fill it.
“Oh, Commissioner,” Liana Bell said engagingly, “please call me Liana. Dr. Mallin is always addressing me as ‘Dr. Bell.’ It makes me feel like I should be wearing flat-heeled shoes and have my hair up in a bun.”
Jack looked down at her feet, as if to punctuate the fact that she was wearing sturdy boots.
She giggled in an attractive way. “Field work is different,” she said.
Confound it! Jack lighted his pipe, interested in what Liana had to say, but with his mind still on the problem of telling Gerd and Ruth to clean up their work and pack for a short trip to Xerxes. Commodore Napier had been very insistent about having a couple of Fuzzyologists along to help his own people evaluate the equipment from Fuzzy Cavern.
“I wish I could spend a month over here, studying the Fuzzies,” Liana said.
Oh, Ghu! Jack thought.
“But I can’t, of course,” she said. “It’s out of the question at this point. Dr. Mallin would never stand for it. Juan should be in about the middle of the morning to take me back to Mallorysport.”
Ah! Jack thought. That tall brunette! He had met her at Ahmed and Sandra’s wedding reception. Word was that Juan had been squiring her around Mallorysport ever since. It must be for real; it wasn’t like Juan to date one of his own employees, even if Ernst Mallin was her immediate superior.
Liana had been busily explaining to everyone what a fine and magnificent person Juan Jimenez was, but Jack had only been listening with one ear as he finally connected on where he had seen her before.
“Do you mean, Miss Bell—” Jack started to say.
“Liana,” she corrected.
“Do you mean, Liana, that you’ve been able to draw conclusions about Fuzzy society in a few days that have eluded qualified xeno-naturalists for more than a year?”
“Oh, Commissioner Holloway—” she began.
“Jack,” he corrected.
“Yes,” she said, “Jack. No, I don’t mean that at all. It’s only a matter of specialization. I look for things that are within a very narrow spectrum, really. And I haven’t drawn any conclusions; I’ve only found a number of fascinating things about Fuzzies that raise unique questions in sociology. They’re an other human race, and yet the patterns in Fuzzy social systems are not at all what we might suspect by application of our own history as a comparison.”
“The other human race,” Gerd said, drawing reflectively on his cigarette. “Good phrase.”
“You see,” Liana continued, “we’ve always applied Terran ethnology to other intelligent species which were at different levels of development. Eight times, now, we’ve been pretty much right. This time, I’m not so sure. I don’t think we can stretch those comparisons far enough to make room for Fuzzies. They just don’t want to fit into our orderly explanations for our own behavior. That’s what’s so exciting about it. With Fuzzies, we may have to start from scratch in order to unravel their sociology.”
Jack nodded agreement. “What brings you to this idea— and so quickly?” he asked. Wit
h his pipe, he motioned for her to continue.
“Contradictions,” she said simply. She paused. “Let me see, now, how to put this non-technically.”
“Fuzzies appear to be a paleolithic society,” she said, “that is, according to the way we’re used to measuring such things. In a paleolithic civilization there are tradition structures which we normally expect to find and from which we can identify the development level of the culture. These have nothing to do with weapons, tool-making abilities, and those sorts of things. I mean, nuts and bolts are not in my specialty. A lot of these expected traditions are totally absent in Fuzzy society. They just don’t fit with our established definition of an intelligent species that is in a primitive state of civilization.”
Gerd nodded. “I’ve got to give you that,” he said, “and I’ve been wondering about it from the beginning. Fuzzies have about as much concept of magic and religion, for example, as they do of nuclear physics and electronics. Yet, Little Fuzzy’s catechism for explaining why something exists often operates on the grounds that it is so ‘because Pappy Jack says it’s so. ’”
“And that certainly doesn’t fit,” Ruth said. “I’ve worked with extraterrestrials on Loki and Thor and Shesha. Everything functions as a result of how the gods feel that day to those people. Great Gnu, the Grandfather God of the Thorans, has so many helpers and minor gods keeping track of everything for him that—the last I heard—we still haven’t completely cataloged the pantheon which the Thorans credit with running the planet—not to mention the rest of the universe.”
“Exactly,” Liana said. “And Fuzzies are supposed to be a primitive society; without any of the traditional nature gods and spirits that such peoples invent to explain natural phenomena.”
“I’ve worked with the Khooghras on Yggsdrasil,” Gerd said. “They have a vocabulary that consists of the grand total of eighty-two words, but they still have room for one, nrooshta, that means supernatural. They use it quite a lot, since their level of sapience is so low that almost every mundane occurrence is quite mysterious to them.”
Jack leaned forward in his chair. “By gum!” he said, “you know, you’re right. I’ve been on a lot of those planets, myself—plus a lot more—but I’d never looked at it quite that way. The Fuzzies are unique in those respects. Say on, Liana, say on. What other trees have we overlooked as a result of standing in the middle of the forest?”
Liana beamed. Jack Holloway was beginning to warm up to her. Without being fully aware of it, she wanted his approval because Juan Jimenez took a great deal of stock in Jack’s opinions about things and people.
“Well,” she said, “there are a lot of things that derive— or, in this case, fail to derive—from the primitive’s attribution of natural occurrences to supernatural causes, and the vacancy seems uniform among Fuzzies.” She ticked off several points on the long, slender fingers of her left hand. “They have no perceivable ritual practices, except for burying their own dead, and that could merely involve sanitation and the desirability of making it harder for predators to trail them. They have no Creation myths that I’ve been able to find. There is no stereotyping of sex roles; females hunt alongside males, and males assist with child-rearing. They don’t fight over territory or resources—like watering spots, for example. There is no tribal structure, unless you call temporary banding together in groups of five or six tribal. I don’t. I can’t find any concept of a hierarchy; no hereditary chiefs or medicine-men. I think, by the way, that Little Fuzzy’s obvious leadership role is a very isolated occurrence.”
“And,” she continued, “Fuzzies don’t measure time in any sort of record-keeping way. Numbers and counting just don’t seem to interest them. You all know about that, of course, but for a society composed of people with Fuzzy-level intelligence, such practices are completely unheard of.”
“But not impossible,” Jack said.
Liana frowned prettily. “I don’t follow you,” she said.
“What I mean,” Jack said, “is that a primitive intelligence doesn’t learn things which have no practical benefit to apply. It doesn’t mean that the primitive is not able to learn, say, to tell time—only that he is not interested, because he can’t see any use for it.”
“That’s one of the things that makes this business of measuring intelligence and charting social systems so tricky,” Liana said. “We have the stubborn habit of applying our own yardsticks to totally alien creatures, and singing ourselves a lullaby that it’s all right because they are anthropomorphic and look something like us.”
“You’re right, of course,” Jack said. “We never had the least notion that Fuzzies could count beyond twenty—five— using the fingers of one hand to count with and those of the other hand to keep tally. Christiana Stone, though, taught Little Fuzzy to tell time by counting the digit marks on a watch. As soon as he saw it was useful to us, he picked it right up—and without any repeat lessons, either. Then, there’s Starwatcher. He counts time by star and planet movements, although he still uses the old hand-and-fingers method.”
“Starwatcher?” Liana said. “I don’t recall him.”
Gerd shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
Jack squirmed a little, as well. Damn! Old Man Holloway is getting forgetful. I don’t think we want someone from Company Science Center to know much about Upland Fuzzies just yet—at least not till we’re ready to start releasing our data.
“He’s another Fuzzy I know,” Jack said smoothly. “I imagine you’ll meet him sooner or later—that is, if you continue your Fuzzy project.”
Liana’s face became eager. “Yes,” she said, “I’m dying to continue. There’s so much to be learned.”
Lynne Andrews had been quiet during most of the conversation, but now she suddenly spoke up. “What about contamination?” she asked. “Won’t all this exposure of Fuzzies to Terrans change their society and contaminate the study experiments? Their language has so many Terran words in it now that it’s either a distinct dialect or even a new language—sub-Fuzzy.”
Contamination. Lynne’s M.D. was in pediatrics, so it was natural for her to think in terms of infection versus immunology.
Liana pursed her lips. “I don’t think contamination is really the right word,” she said reflectively. “Influence would be better, that is, as far as future development is concerned. Terrans have branched into Fuzzy social systems at year 654 A.E. with resulting interaction and influence—us on them and them on us—but we can never tamper with the origins that shaped the social systems. It was what it was when we first viewed it in time, and nothing can change what happened before the moment when Jack discovered Little Fuzzy hiding in the shower stall.”
“You mean it’s a natural system,” Gerd said.
“What?” Liana asked.
“As differentiated from an artificial, or created system,” Gerd replied. “It’s a term xeno-naturalists use a lot. The computer guys and the environmental engineers talk about systems all the time. They mean something man-made. When we talk about systems, we’re often talking about ecology, or food chains, or breeding habits, so we use the term natural systems to avoid blurring the two ideas.”
“Oh, sure, “Liana said. “I see what you mean. Yes, it’s a natural system. All the Fuzzy culture that existed before that first contact between Fuzzy and Terran is already imprinted. Nothing can change it. But, we have to analyze it if we hope to understand the nature of events which produced it, and which made Fuzzies what they are.”
Jack leaned back and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. “How can you get around their alien thinking?” he asked. “They think as well as we do—maybe better—but their processes of thinking are different; their thinking patterns are alien, by definition.”
“Custom,” she said. “Ingrained custom forms the fabric of social systems, so we study that. Once established, such practices do not undergo essential change. Look at us; wherever Terrans go, the first thing they plant is coffee and tobacco, so they can have coffee and ciga
rettes in the morning. The next local product is some source for ethyl alcohol, so we can have a cocktail hour at the end of the day. The natives on planets like Loki and Gimli and Thor—and even Shesha and Uller—think it’s a religious observance.”
“Maybe it is,” Jack said.
“The Fuzzies would think that, if they had any notions about religion,” Ruth said. “They understand the cocktail hour is very important to Terrans, so they always go to great pains not to interrupt it.”
“Big Ones drink tosh-ki waji. Make Big One talk,” Gerd said.
Liana spread her hands. “Social systems,” she said. “I think what Gerd said about natural systems is likely a more revealing way to put it. We never really escape from a social system, because it’s a natural system. All the impact of technology on human culture hasn’t made the slightest dent in those kind of systems; they’ve been with us longer than the wheel.”
“Something could, though, couldn’t it?” Lynne asked. “Surely there must be something that would have such a profound effect on our civilization that it would alter society itself.”
Liana shrugged. “Nothing big enough has come along yet,” she said. “If the Atomic Wars, contragravity, the Dillingham Drive, and interstellar colonization weren’t big enough, I can’t think of anything that would be. That’s why we use social system establishment as a common denominator.”
“The idea of a ‘clean break with the past’ is a romantic notion easily poked full of holes by reality. Our social systems are what shape us and define us. We are essentially nothing, except in relation to them. We cannot deal out the deck again.”
“The same holds true for Fuzzies. At least that’s the way I would approach examining the matter.”
Jack smiled. “Is there anything you’re not sure of, Liana?”
Fuzzy Bones (v1.1) Page 27
