Of Men and Monsters

by William Tenn

  Rachel relaxed, letting out a huge breath. "Are you satisfied?" she inquired with exactly the proper amount of anxiety. Eric was terribly pleased: he'd been afraid from her jocular manner of speaking that she knew nothing at all of formal behavior.

  "I am satisfied," he told her, using the decorous phrases of the courtship formula. "You please me. I want you for my mate."

  "Good. I am glad. Now I claim the Right of Invitation. You may not approach me sexually for the first time until I give you leave."

  "That is your right," Eric agreed. "I will wait for your call. May it come soon! May it come soon! May it come soon!"

  And it was over. They stood apart and grinned at each other self-consciously, observing mutual individuality re-turn as the ritual prototype was sloughed off. Above them, below them, around them, lay the white vastnesses of Monster territory, the transparent cages in which fellow humans awaited fate and the Monsters' pleasure. But here in this cage, they were mate and mate, Eric and Rachel, two separate people who would become one, when the girl felt the time was ripe to beckon.

  Suddenly Rachel giggled. "I was so nervous! Were you nervous?"

  "A little," Eric admitted. "After all, from start to finish, it was a pretty fast mating. One of the fastest I ever heard about."

  "I hope we didn't leave anything out, Eric."

  "No, we didn't leave anything out. Nothing that was important, anyway. Except," he suddenly remembered with annoyance, "except for a condition I wanted to make. Something I wanted you to agree to do before we went through the ceremony. Then I got so caught up in the ritual responses that I forgot all about it."

  "Your tough luck," she sang out and began a mad little dance around him. "Too late, too late! Agreements before the mating—never after." At the angry expression on his face, she stopped and took his hands. "I'm only joking, Eric. I have too much of a sense of humor for my own damn good. Among my people, there is a saying: "Most children are born with a wail. Rachel Esthersdaughter was born with a laugh. And she'll probably die with a laugh.' You tell me what you were going to ask, and I'll do it. Whatever it is. Anything."

  "Well" Now that he had come to it, Eric found difficulty in the phrasing. He didn't know if a man had ever asked a woman such a thing before. "I want you to teach me. I want you to teach me everything you know."

  "You want me to—you mean, you want an education?"

  "That's it, Rachel, that's what I want," he said eagerly. "An education. Knowledge. I don't expect you to tell me the secrets of the Aaron People's Female Society—I'm not asking you to break any oaths. But I want to know what at least the average man in your people knows. About the Monsters, about counting, about the history of our ancestors. How Alien-Science came to be, how Ancestor-Science came to be. How Strangers make the things they do, what the things are used for. How— What— I don't even know what I want to know!" he broke off miser-ably.

  "But I do," she said gently touching him on the face with an open, caressing palm. "And I'll be very willing to teach you, Eric, very willing indeed, darling. Don't you worry about my Female Society and its secrets: engineering is the last thing we'll get to. Do you want to start now?"

  "Yes!" he exclaimed, his eyes shining. "I want to start right this moment!"

  "Then sit down." She lowered herself to the floor and took some writing implements from one of the pockets of the nearby cloak. Eric squatted beside her. Now that he'd been able to put it into words, he found himself filled with a hunger such as he'd never known. The hunger for food, the hunger for sex—they were nothing like this. This was a singing hunger that filled your mind and made it want to hear more and more and more of the song.

  Rachel looked at him quizzically for a moment. "What a way to begin a mating! With scratcher and repeatable slate. If my friends back in the Aaron People ever heard of this! If your friends— But Eric, seriously, I'm very pleased. That was the only thing about mating with you that really bothered me: you being a front-burrow barbarian. In our terms, of course, and who are we to say that our terms are right? But it did bother me. I'll teach you everything I know. Where do you want me to begin?"

  Eric leaned towards her, his whole body tense. "Begin with protoplasm. I want to know all there is to know about protoplasm."

  Pursuing knowledge, Eric discovered, was like running through the burrows. The corridor you were traveling kept forking off into two or three others. Most of the time, you could only see a little ways ahead; suddenly, you came around a curve into a confrontation that astonished you.

  Astronomy, for example, was such a confrontation. At first, it seemed utterly useless: a body of arcane, almost incomprehensible data, unrelated to anything at all real. You learned astronomy by rote, associating the various strange names with little circles scratched out on the repeatable slate.

  First there was Earth, Earth which was to be won back from the Monsters. Earth was some kind of ball which hung, or revolved, or wandered in something that was called space. Earth was a planet, and there were other planets in space; there were also stars and comets and galaxies, dust and gas and radiation, all of them likewise in space, most of them incredible distances from Earth.

  Eric kept repeating the names of planets and astronomical objects which meant nothing to him, which simply accumulated in his head like so much fuzz, until one day he stumbled on the trick of analogy. If you thought of Earth like a warm, safe corridor that you were in just before you opened the door to Monster territory, well then, opening the door was like soaring off Earth. Monster territory with its alien environment and incredible dangers would be space, and on the other side of it you might find another doorway leading to a strange new burrow-that would be another planet, or another star.

  All right, that helped, it made it a bit more understand-able; but certainly no more pertinent or useful.

  Then came the confrontation in Eric's mind—and he gasped as he came around the curve.

  He remembered the conversation with Walter the Weapon-Seeker while they were on expedition to this place. Walter had talked of a boy in his band who had wondered what lay outside of Monster territory itself, what it was that compared to the Monster burrows as the Monster burrows compared to the human ones. Walter had dismissed the ideas as too much for the human mind to contemplate. But it wasn't! Here, here in astronomy was the answer. A much larger place, Earth, lay outside and all around Monster Territory. And a much, much larger place, interplanetary or interstellar space, lay out-side and all around Earth. The Monsters, in terms of what they ultimately inhabited, were as trivial, as insignificant, as infinitesimal as any human beings.

  And were human beings truly insignificant? They hadn't always been. Eric thrilled with the pride of belonging to a race that had worked out a system of recorded signals as clever as the alphabet, that could take ordinary numbers and squeeze them into unrecognizable shapes, pulling out a piece here, a piece there... .

  "No, Eric, no!" Rachel announced definitely, flinging her scratcher down on the cloak near which they were sitting. "There's no point in discussing this any further. You're trying to push me into an explication of Homer's method and synthetic division—and I absolutely refuse. My math isn't that good in the first place, and after all, sweetheart, this is supposed to be a survey course and no more. You're a glutton: you absorb and absorb and absorb. Sometimes you frighten me. You could go without sleep for days, couldn't you?"

  Eric nodded. He felt as if he were on a war band foray. Who wanted sleep when you were filled with the excitement of what you might capture if you only kept going? But women, he remembered, were different. They never seemed to feel that particular excitement.

  He considered his mate carefully and with tenderness. She did look tired. Well, they had been at their lessons almost from the moment they had opened their eyes. "Do you want to go to sleep, darling?"

  "Ooh, I'd love to!" she said, her voice throbbing tragically but her eyes still grinning at him. "I've been thinking of nothing else. But I can't. You're the
man and the leader here. You have to declare it night."

  "I do," he said. "Night. Let's sack in." He lay back on the hard cage floor and watched her put the writing apparatus away in the proper pocket of her cloak. Eric thought to himself how graceful she was, how very, very desirable. And how much she knew! Much more than she had taught him. This synthetic division, for example, he pondered as she nestled her head into his shoulder—how would you do it? Was it at all like ordinary long division? If it was

  Yes, he thought, while he was opening his eyes and about to declare it day, yes, the pursuit of knowledge was like a trip through an unexplored section of the burrows. Once in a while, you'd say, "That little corridor off there—where does that one lead?" And your teacher would say, just like your band leader had when you'd been an apprentice warrior, "I don't know, and it's not important right now: pay attention to where we're going."

  Eric paid attention, and he learned. He learned some chemistry, some physics, some biology. He learned about chlorophyllous plants which he had never been near in his entire life and about one-celled animals which had been around him and about him all through his life but which he had been unable to see any more than the plants.

  "And your people really have? Through those microscope things?"

  "Not microscope things, Eric—microscope thing. We have exactly one set of clumsy, hand-ground lenses. In the time when our ancestors owned the Earth, they had—oh, they must have had dozens. But they were an advanced, technologically oriented civilization: it was no trick for them to make two, three, even five microscopes at once. I mean that—don't look dubious—I'm not trying to feed you myths and legends. These were people, remember, who had achieved space travel themselves before the Monsters arrived, not interstellar flight, as the Monsters had, and not colonization as yet of other worlds, but they were making their way from planet to planet of their own system in ships that were almost as wonderful and complicated as those the Monsters suddenly turned up in. Our tragedy was that all the peoples of the Earth had at their disposal no more than about ten space ships—simple interplanetary exploring craft—when the Monsters came pouring out of the stars with an invasion fleet of thousands. Another century of development, maybe only fifty years, and we'd have had a space navy that wouldn't have been brushed aside by the first Monster patrol to arrive in the solar system."

  Eric smiled and stared through the bottom of the cage at other cages suspended in the white vastness where human captives lay sleeping or walked about restlessly. "The suddenness of the attack . . ." he quoted.

  "What?"

  "Oh, it's part of the catechism I had to learn as a boy—from the Ancestor-Science faith I was brought up in. I remember how shocked I was when my uncle said it was all garbage. I was so upset! But then I learned to live with the idea. You know, that it was garbage, a flock of nonsense imposed on us by our elders to keep us from asking questions and learning the truth about our past. And now, here I am again, learning that the people who have searched out more records concerning our ancestors than anyone else in the burrows—they have no more to say, basically, than that, as to why humanity succumbed. The suddenness of the attack . . . It makes me wonder whether any beliefs are true. Or—I don't know—whether all beliefs are true."

  "Hey, there." Rachel reached up and grabbed a handful of his hair. She pulled his head back and forth gently. "Just a little education and you feel you're ready for metaphysics."

  "Is that metaphysics?" Eric asked, delighted to have rediscovered an ancient human technique all by him-self.

  The girl elaborately ignored his question. "You have a lot of hard facts to learn yet," she went on, "you old Eric the Eye you, even if you do gulp down information like so much drinking water. Maybe all beliefs are true—in certain ways, for certain people, at certain times. They wouldn't be beliefs if they didn't contain some significant core of reality. Like the stories that have come down to us of a group of our ancestors who believed that man was getting too much above himself, and that the arrival of the Monsters constituted a judgment, a judgment from some supernatural force to obliterate our civilization. They felt that space travel and atomics were just the last straw, and that once we developed those, the supernatural force was compelled to write us off. Well, you know something? They might have been right."

  "They were? How?"

  Rachel slid the repeatable slate, covered with scientific diagrams, back into a cloak pocket. Then she walked to the wall of the cage near which they had been sitting and leaned against it, rubbing her forehead against t'-e smooth, cold surface. She looked very tired.

  "In a couple of ways, Eric. You take your pick. First, religiously. It's always possible that there was—or is—such a supernatural force, capable of coming to just such a judgment. And when you look at how puny, how ridiculously tiny, our species appears today, scuttling about the dwelling places of the Monsters, it does seem that back then, in our last great period, we did get slightly above ourselves. Now, if you ask me why—to use some ancestral phraseology—we should be cast down and the Monsters raised up, I tell you frankly I don't have the least idea. I only say that if you postulate a supernatural force, you are not necessarily postulating a mode of thought understandable by human beings nor necessarily sympathetic to their aspirations."

  Eric rose and stood beside her. He leaned against the wall With his back, not taking his eyes off her, completely fascinated by the concepts which her pretty mouth was shaping. "Nor," he suggested, "do we necessarily postulate a mode of thought sympathetic to Monster aspirations."

  "Perhaps. But what do we know of Monster aspirations, of the way they live with each other, compared to the ways human beings have always lived with each other? They might be, among themselves, decent and brotherly creatures—and how would we find out? We know as little about them as they know about us. They don't even seem to consider us intelligent, to connect us with the planet-wide civilization they destroyed centuries ago. Well, who knows? In their eyes, maybe it wasn't a real civilization, maybe we look more natural to them in our present state. And us? We don't understand the first thing about them after I don't know how many auld lang synes of observation—what kind of government they have, if they have a government, what kind of language they have, if they have a language, what kind of sex life they have, if they have a sex life."

  "What they originally used the explosive red blobs for, why some of them will rush and trample us and others will panic and dash away," Eric added, thinking of the practical problems with which he had been grappling at the times when Rachel had been asleep and he had paced back and forth in the cage by himself. "All that you're saying, though, is that they're different: they're not provably better. Maybe this supernatural force thought so, but then I'd argue with it: I'd question its assumptions. On what other basis did our ancestors—this group of them who believed the coming of the Monsters was a judgment —on what other basis could they have been right?"

  Rachel smiled at him, her eyes a tiny distance from his face. "You'd argue with the supernatural force, would you, Eric—you'd tell it that it was wrong? I'll bet you would: I can just see you doing it. You're the sum of everything that was ever good and bad about the human male. The second basis is moral; you might say it derived from an abiding and justified sense of guilt."

  "Justified? What kind of guilt?"

  "Certain beliefs, as I said . . . somewhere, in each, there's a significant core of reality. Man was lord of the Earth for a long time, Eric, and for that long time he was guilt-ridden. All of his religion and all of his literature—the literature that was written by sane men and not mad-men—was filled with guilt. If you put the legendary part aside and just look at the things he really did, he had reason to be. He enslaved his fellow men, he tortured and humiliated them. He destroyed his fellow civilizations, he demolished their temples and universities and used the stones to build outhouses. Sometimes men would trample on women and mock their hurt, sometimes women would trample on men and mock their hurt. In
some places parents would keep children in chains for all of their growing up; in other places children would send useless parents out with orders to die. And this was with his own species, with homo sapiens. What did he do with species that were brothers and with whom he grew to maturity? We know what he did with Neanderthal man: how many others lie in the unmarked graves of anthropological history?"

  "Man is an animal, Rachel! His duty is to survive."

  "Man is more than an animal, Eric. His duty comprehends more than survival. If one animal feeds on another and, in the process, wipes it out, that's biology; if man does the same thing, out of overpowering need or mere caprice, he knows he has committed a crime. Whether he's right or wrong in taking this attitude isn't important: he knows he has committed a crime. That is a thoroughly human realization, that it cannot be dismissed with an evolutionary shrug."

  He moved away from the wall and strode up and down the cage in front of her, opening and closing his hands uncomfortably, clasping them together and pulling them apart. "All right," he said at last, coming to a stop. "Man murdered his brothers all through history and his brother species all through prehistory. Suppose I don't dismiss it. What then?"

  "Then you examine the criminal's record a bit more thoroughly. What about the other species—those you might call his cousins? I've told you of animals he domesticated: the ox, the ass, the horse, the dog, the cat, the pig. Do you know what is covered by the word domestication?

  Castration, for one thing, hybridization, for another. Taking the mother's milk away from her young. Taking the skin away from the body. Taking the meat away from the bones, as part of a planned economic process, and training one animal to lead others of its kind to slaughter. Taking the form away from the creature so that it be-comes a comic caricature of its original self—as was done with dogs. Taking the purpose away from the generative powers so that it becomes a mad, perpetual factory of infertile eggs—as was done with hens. Taking its most basic expression of pride and turning it into drudgery or sport as was done with horses and bulls.