by E. M. Foner
Human Test
Copyright 2018 by E. M. Foner
Sequel to “Turing Test”
One
“You’re cut off, Hosea,” I told my remaining customer when he pushed forward his empty tankard with a self-satisfied belch. “I’m not going to be responsible for you getting into an accident.”
“Tor drives himself,” the farmer protested, “and at the speed he goes, you’d have to be asleep in the road to get run over.”
“And you’ve never slept in the road? Be honest, now.”
Hosea opened his mouth and then closed it again, and I could practically see the neurons firing in his brain as he dredged up old memories. His shoulders slumped in defeat.
“Early to bed, early to rise,” I consoled the disappointed man while presenting the slate with his tally. “That’s thirty coppers worth you took onboard tonight, plus twenty-four more treating Yitzhak and Xeres after you beat them.”
The memory of that triumph over his fellow date-growers immediately cheered Hosea. “My load weighed in four Kav more than Yitzhak’s, and Xeres fell a full Se’ah short. That’s from the same number of trees, mind you. It’s all in the pollination technique.” Here he performed a few intricate hand maneuvers that meant nothing to me. “If you figure thirty-three dates per Log, I beat them by…” he reached for the slate and looked around for a piece of chalk.
“You beat Yitzhak by five hundred and twenty-eight dates and Xeres by seven hundred and ninety-two,” I provided the answer to speed him along his way.
Hosea’s eye took on a peculiar gleam and he asked, “Can you break a gold?”
“You always do this to me,” I complained. “No, I can’t break a gold at the end of the night on a Weighing Day. I’m lucky if I can break a silver.”
“Well, you’ll just have to chalk it up to my account and I’ll take care of it next time I’m here.” He lurched up from his stool, planning a quick exit, but stumbled over a chair and almost ended up on the floor before catching his balance. “Excuse me,” Hosea said to the chair in that strange version of Aramaic that was spoken by the inhabitants. The language also included large vocabulary borrowings from Classical Greek and other Mediterranean tongues, the region of Earth from which the Ferrymen had originally drawn the population for this continent of the world.
“Maybe you’d better sleep it off in the storeroom,” I suggested. “I’ll set up the bunk.”
“Tor will bring the wagon home,” he insisted, then reversed course and headed for the restroom. “I’ll just leave my contribution to the tannery in the old barrel. You ought to give your customers a discount for all of the urea you get out of us.”
“It’s a recycling service, Dan doesn’t pay me,” I called after Hosea, who didn’t respond. “Alright, then. I’ll just get your team turned around.”
There were two oxen yoked to the farm cart, but Tor was the older and wiser of the pair, and more curious as well. He and his companion were finished with the grain Hosea had poured into the feed trough for them before entering my establishment, and Tor may have thought that their master had sent me out with dessert. Hope springs eternal in draft animals, but it wasn’t to be.
“Back,” I called to the oxen, strongly enough to get their attention, but hopefully not so loud as to wake eBeth, who was asleep upstairs by this hour. I was never one to hit animals, not even thick-skinned ones that barely noticed the driver’s goad, but I let a little electricity flow through the hand I put on the younger ox’s flank to let him know I meant business. A couple more “Backs” and a “Haw” later, and I had the team and the wagon pointed down the road in the direction of Hosea’s home.
“Thanks,” the farmer said, climbing up on the bench. Then he leaned towards me, coming perilously close to an unintended descent, and asked in a loud stage whisper, “Want to see something?”
“Are you sure you aren’t going to fall off that seat? It must be a good half-hour drive to your place.”
“That’s what I want to show you,” he said, his face taking on a crafty look. “See this harness?” he demanded, holding up a confused tangle of leather straps.
“Are you thinking of replacing your oxen with horses or mules?” I asked in surprise.
“It’s not for the animals.” He hiccupped and squirmed his way into the restraints, which I now saw were tied through hooks on the bench and the wagon body. “Your cousin Paul made it for me special.” After tightening a strap across his chest, he threw himself violently from side to side, and sure enough, the harness kept his body firmly upright and in place. “No more falling off the wagon for me. Get up! Get up, there!” he cried, and the two oxen began their walk home.
“Wouldn’t hurt you to spend some time on the wagon for real,” I called after him, knowing that he wouldn’t understand my reference even if he heard me.
In the six months since we arrived on Reservation, I’ve noted that the humans are surprisingly moderate in their alcohol consumption compared to their counterparts back on Earth, but Hosea had been hitting it a bit hard since his wife moved away. She left him a note saying that after thirty years of farming the same patch of land she wanted to see the ocean, but Sue tells me it’s more complicated than that.
Back inside, I snuffed all but one of the candles to save on wax and began quietly straightening up in the dim light. A ghostly figure appeared on the stairs leading down from the second floor. It was eBeth in her nightshirt.
“Who was that shouting at the oxen?” she asked in a sleepy voice.
“Hosea. He’s been having a hard time lately. Have you seen Spot?”
“He’s sleeping on my bed. I tried to send him down to check on the noise but he just yawned at me and started that fake snoring he does to get out of moving his lazy butt.”
“You have school in the morning and you’re a growing girl,” I reminded her. “You should be getting your rest.”
“And you should have cut off Hosea two ales ago,” she retorted. “Anyway, I’ve been having problems in class and Sue suggested that I talk to you.”
“I’m sure she meant in the morning,” I said, but eBeth had already slumped into a chair. I took the seat opposite while cursing the idiot who had decided that the team should maintain radio frequency silence, which prevented me from contacting Sue to find out what was on the girl’s mind. “Is it about boys?”
“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded, coming fully awake. “How come every time a woman has a problem, whatever man she tells about it just assumes that it’s some other man? Death Lord asked the same question.”
“You agreed to call Peter by his given name while we’re here. Death Lord carries a certain negative connotation amongst primitive cultures.”
“If you think this society is primitive then our culture back on Earth must have struck you as positively prehistoric,” she shot back, and paused for me to contradict her. I let the opportunity pass in silence, so she continued with, “I feel like I’m deceiving them.”
“Technically, you are deceiving them, but that doesn’t change anything,” I told her. “Learning a new language is good for human brain development, and they can always speak it with each other.”
“But the school hired me to teach the children Northern! What if they find out?”
“How? By traveling a month to the coast, booking passage on one of the three trading fleets a year that makes the long voyage to the northern continent when the winds are right, and then coming back here and telling everybody? If one of your students left tomorrow, I doubt they could complete the round trip in a year, and by then we’ll be finished here.”
“But I’m teaching them English!” eBeth persisted as if I hadn’t said anything. “They�
��ll be the only ones within a million light years who can speak it.”
“Our galaxy isn’t even a hundred thousand light years across—” I began, but she must not have been in the mood for a math lesson because she talked right over my explanation.
“And it’s not just children. Some of the kids who are auditing the class are my age, and the headmaster has been sitting in with some other old people. He even asked if I would be interested in teaching a night class for adults.”
“That’s quite a compliment, but I don’t want you stretching yourself too thin,” I told her seriously. “You could give up being my apprentice, of course, but I thought you enjoyed learning about state-of-the-art technology.”
“Don’t make fun of these people. It’s not their fault that electrical generation and internal combustion engines are banned. I doubt any of them have even seen the authenticity videos for the products that they’re making. They just stand in front of the lens on those little cubes they call “Ferrymen’s Eyes’ and talk about their work.”
“I’m using the term in a local context. Gears and hydraulics are state-of-the-art on this world and I happen to find them fascinating. Maintaining complex machinery is also the ideal cover job since it gives me an excuse to travel to the surrounding villages and towns.”
“But my students trust me and I’m lying to them,” eBeth practically wailed.
“You knew we would be undercover when you signed on for the mission,” I reminded her. “When I was running my computer repair service and restaurant training school back on Earth, did I run around admitting to people that I was an alien artificial intelligence construct?”
“Sometimes, when you were recruiting labor for off-world jobs. Besides, you and your team acted so weird that anybody who was paying attention could have guessed.”
“Do your students enjoy the class?”
“That just makes me feel more guilty. I’ve even heard people who aren’t my students using English words at the market, like the kids are bringing it home. The worst part is that I’m not getting any more fluent in Modern Aramaic, or whatever you decided to call it.”
“You’re progressing just fine,” I assured her. “It’s typical for humans your age who are learning a new language in an immersive environment to make their biggest gains in the first few months. Your progress is slowing now because you can communicate pretty well with what you’ve already learned.”
“Death Lord speaks it better than I do.”
“Peter is interacting with customers at Paul’s machine shop all day, while you’re teaching English in the mornings and working with me in the afternoons. I could start speaking to you exclusively in the local—”
“No,” she interrupted hastily. “I have enough trouble understanding you when I know all the words you’re using. Sue is a saint for putting up with you.”
“Speaking of my second-in-command, have you seen her tonight?”
“She said something about her weaving circle getting near the end of their carpet, so the women are staying late this week. It’s almost the holidays and they’re all counting on the extra income.”
“What is it, eBeth?” I asked, catching the troubled note in her voice.
“Why do these people celebrate Ferrymen’s Day?”
“To commemorate being moved to this world.”
“You see,” the girl said in frustration. “This is exactly what I mean. We’re speaking the same language but we aren’t communicating.”
I could have admitted that she was right, but instead I took a stab in the dark. “Did you mean to ask why these people are happy that the Ferrymen took them from Earth and brought them here in the first place?”
“Obviously. And why the people aren’t angry that the Ferrymen prohibit them from developing modern technology. Do you know what one of the other teachers said when I asked her about textbooks?”
“I wasn’t there and you didn’t tell me about it.”
“It was a rhetorical question. She told me that movable type was all well and fine for reference books, but that the students learn better when they pay attention to the teachers and take notes. It’s like they’re collaborating with their captors!”
“After six months on Reservation, you still think of the Ferrymen as kidnappers?” I asked in surprise. “That’s never been the way they operated. All of these people, or their ancestors, chose to board the landing craft and make the interstellar journey.”
“But they thought they were obeying the will of the Sky Gods.”
“I don’t think that’s the case. It’s true that primitive people often mistake advanced aliens for gods, but that doesn’t mean there’s malicious intent involved.”
“How can posing as gods not be malicious?”
“The Ferrymen are members of the League of Sentient Entities Regulating Space,” I pointed out. “I won’t bore you with all the case law about Sky God procedures, but it boils down to efficiency. Imagine it’s a few thousand years ago on Earth and there’s been a natural disaster like a drought, or that an army has just marched through and seized all of the livestock and food stores, including seeds for the next year’s crop. A transport drops from the heavens, an emissary invites the survivors to move to a world without wars, and the offer includes feeding and sheltering the people until they can get back on their feet.”
“Plus accepting their rescuers as gods and being exploited to make hand-crafted goods for the galactic luxury market,” eBeth interjected.
“All of that comes much later, when the population is established. You’ve seen the stone tablets in front of the village temple. They’re a copy of the legal covenant between the Ferrymen and the humans.”
“Sounds like a religion to me.”
“A covenant is just another word for a contract. And if you read it, you’ll note that there’s nothing in there about worship, sacrifices, or cheap labor.”
“But the Ferrymen treat this whole planet like a factory,” eBeth argued, the indignation rising in her voice. “Maybe Sue enjoys tying little knots in carpets and recording all the weaving songs for your cultural archives, but the women who live here don’t have a choice.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked, sincerely puzzled by the question. “It’s true that we’re here to investigate the conditions and report back to Library’s representative on the League’s executive council, but I haven’t seen anything yet that would be considered a violation.”
“The Ferrymen are keeping these people from advancing!”
“They placed certain restrictions on industrialization but that’s just their version of social engineering. If the people weren’t happy, the Ferrymen wouldn’t get their Persian carpets and dragon saddles for export. I think it’s a synergistic relationship.”
“Parasitic.”
“Go to sleep, eBeth. We can talk about this tomorrow—I mean, later today if you like.”
“I’m going up because I’m tired and I have to teach in the morning, not because you’re right, which you aren’t,” she told me, rising from the chair. “And you shouldn’t keep serving Hosea until he can barely sit on his wagon.”
I thought briefly about protesting, but the truth was I already felt guilty about selling Hosea that last ale, and maybe the one before it. The fact he hadn’t paid me took the sting off my conscience, and I went back to putting the chairs up on the tables so I could sweep the floor. Frenay would mop when she came in the morning to help her husband with the cooking. When I purchased The Eatery from the couple who had previously owned it, they had agreed to stay on for one year in return for my paying the carpenter who was building their vacation cottage on the lake.
“Guess who,” somebody called from the doorway.
I spun around at the unfamiliar voice, but it was just Sue imitating one of the women from her weaving circle.
“I wish you would stop doing that,” I grumbled as my second-in-command came up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. She pulled away with a hurt expres
sion, and I immediately corrected myself. “Not the kissing, the impersonations. I’m jumpy enough going around with all of my active sensors shut down. I understand that kissing is important to you as a sign of our deepening relationship.”
“Whose idiotic idea was it to enforce radio frequency silence?”
“Mine,” I admitted. “We don’t know whether the Ferrymen are monitoring the spectrum for alien visitors or violations in their covenant so we have to avoid using any advanced technology.”
“Except for the antenna array you have Paul building to watch for Pffift’s arrival.”
“It’s all passive, except for the receiver, and that’s so well shielded that you wouldn’t notice the emissions if you were standing right on top of it. If I didn’t give Paul something constructive to work on he’d just end up making trouble. Besides, I gave Pffift my word.”
“He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to come see us,” Sue said, stroking the artificial hair on the back of my encounter suit’s arm as if I was one of her cats. “We almost finished the carpet for that T’poulf merchant prince, though it’s beyond me why he’d want visitors walking on a giant portrait of himself.”
“What do the other women in your weaving circle think of it?”
“Ruth thought he was kind of cute for a Pegasus-looking species, but she was the only one to express an opinion. To the rest of our circle, it’s just some image delivered by the purchasing agent to be replicated on a carpet. From what they tell me, the business model hasn’t changed in the dozen generations since this world started accepting special orders from the Ferrymen in addition to making their usual products. The women look forward to their weaving nights as a chance to get out of the house, come into the village center, and trade juicy gossip. Do you want to know what they think about Justin and Kim?”
“Have those two blown their cover already?”
“As apothecaries? No, just the married part. Cybele swears that her cousin from the provincial capital got the true story from a medicinal herb distributor. According to her, Justin ran out on his wife and children after falling in love with his apprentice.”
