The Year's Best Science Fiction 5

by Judith Merril

  There was another peculiarity which we don’t yet understand, and yet we see it in rudimentary form on Earth where game breeds heartily during seasons of plentiful food, and sparsely in bad years. Here, the goonie did not bear young unless there were unclaimed pal trees available, and did bear young up to a limit of such trees.

  My future was clear, then. Obtain the land and plant the pal trees to insure a constant supply of meat for the colony. It was the farm boy coming out in me, no doubt, but no different from any farm boy who grows up and wants to own his own farm, his own cattle ranch.

  I was a young man trying to build a secure future for himself. There was no thought of the goonie except as a meat supply. I accepted that as a matter of course. And as Libo City grew, I continued to increase my planting of pal trees in my valley, and my herds of goonies.

  It was only later, much later, that I found the goonie could also be trained for work of various kinds. I accepted this, too, in the same spirit we trained colts on the farm to ride, to pull the plow, to work.

  Perhaps it was this training, only for the crudest tasks at first, then later, calling for more and more skill, that proved my undoing. On the farm we separated our pet animals from the rest; we gave our pets names, but we never gave names to those destined for slaughter, nor formed any affection for them. This was taboo. I found myself carrying out the same procedures here. I separated those goonies I trained from the meat herds. Then I separated the common labor goonies from the skilled labor.

  I should have stopped there—at least there. But when man’s curiosity is aroused . . . Can we say to the research scientist, “You may ask this question, but you are forbidden to ask that one. You may take this step, but you must not take a second, to see what lies beyond.” Can we say that to the human mind? I did not say it to myself.

  I taught certain goonies to speak, to read, to write.

  The goonies accepted this training in the same joyful exuberance they accepted everything else from man. I never understood it, not until now. Their whole behavior, their whole being seemed the same as greeted the first hunting party. “You want us to die, man? For you, we will do it gladly.”

  Whatever man wanted, the goonie gave, to the limit of his capacity. And I had not found that limit.

  I took one step too many. I know that now.

  And yet, should I not have taken that last step—teaching them to speak, to read, to write? The capacity was in them for learning it all the time. Was it finding it out that made the difference? But what kind of moral and ethic structure is it that depends on ignorance for its support?

  * * * *

  Miriam Wellman comes into the yarn, too. She was the catalyst. My destruction was not her fault. It would have come about anyway. She merely hastened it. She had a job to do, she did it well. It worked out as she planned, a cauterizing kind of thing, burning out a sore that was beginning to fester on Libo—to leave us hurting a little, but clean.

  Important though she was, she still remains a little hazy to me, a little unreal. Perhaps I was already so deep into my quandary, without knowing it, that both people and things were a little hazy, and the problem deep within me my only reality.

  I was in Libo City the day she landed from the tender that serviced the planets from the mother ship orbiting out in space. I saw her briefly from the barbershop across the street when she came out of the warehouse and walked down our short main street to the Company Administration Building. She was a dark-haired little thing, sharp-eyed, neither young nor old—a crisp, efficient career gal, she seemed to me. I didn’t see any of the men on the street make a pass at her. She had the looks, all right, but not the look.

  There weren’t more than a dozen women on the whole planet, childless women who had forgone having children, who had raked up the exorbitant space fare and come on out to join their man anyhow; and the men should have been falling all over Miriam Wellman—but they weren’t. They just looked, and then looked at each other. Nobody whistled.

  I got a little more of what had happened from the head warehouseman, who was a friend of mine. He smelled something wrong, he said, the minute the tender cut its blasts and settled down. Usually there’s joshing, not always friendly, between the tender crew and the warehouse crew —the contempt of the spaceman for the landbound; the scorn of the landbound for the glamor-boy spacemen who think their sweat is wine.

  Not today. The pilot didn’t come out of his cabin at all to stretch his legs; he sat there looking straight ahead, and the ship’s crew started hustling the dock loaders almost before the hatches opened for unloading a few supplies and loading our packages of libolines—the jewel stone which is cur excuse for being.

  She came down the gangplank, he said, gave a crisp, careless flick of her hand toward the pilot, who must have caught it out of the corner of his eye for he nodded briefly, formally, and froze. Later we learned he was not supposed to tell us who she really was, but he did his best. Only we didn’t catch it.

  She came across the yard with all the human warehousemen staring, but not stepping toward her. Only the goonies seemed unaware. In their fashion, laughing and playing, and still turning out more work than humans could, they were already cleaning out the holds and trucking the supplies over to the loading dock.

  She came up the little flight of stairs at the end of the dock and approached Hal, the head warehouseman, who, he said, was by that time bug-eyed.

  “Do you always let those creatures go around stark naked?” she asked in a low, curious voice. She waved toward the gangs of goonies.

  He managed to get his jaw unhinged enough to stammer.

  “Why, ma’am,” he says he said, “they’re only animals.”

  Nowadays, when he tells it, he claims he saw a twinkle of laughter in her eyes. I don’t believe it. She was too skilled in the part she was playing.

  She looked at him, she looked back at the goonies, and she looked at him again. By then he said he was blushing all over, and sweating as if the dry air of Libo was a steam room. It wasn’t any trick to see how she was comparing, what she was thinking. And every stranger was warned, before he landed, that the one thing the easy-going Liboan wouldn’t tolerate was comparison of goonie with man. Beside them we looked raw, unfinished, poorly done by an amateur. There was only one way we could bear it—there could be no comparison.

  He says he knows he turned purple, but before he could think of anything else to say, she swept on past him, through the main aisle of the warehouse, and out the front door. All he could do was stand there and try to think of some excuse for living, he said.

  She had that effect on people—she cut them down to bedrock with a word, a glance. She did it deliberately. Yes, she came as a Mass Psychology Therapist, a branch of pseudo-science currently epidemic on Earth which believed in the value of emotional purges whipped up into frenzies. She came as a prime trouble-maker, as far as we could see at the time. She came to see that the dear, fresh boys who were swarming out to conquer the universe didn’t fall into the evil temptations of space.

  She came at the critical time. Libo City had always been a small frontier spaceport, a lot like the old frontier towns of primitive Earth—a street of warehouses, commissaries, an Administration building, couple of saloons, a meeting hall, the barracks, a handful of cottages for the men with wives, a few more cottages built by pairs of young men who wanted to shake free of barracks life for a while, but usually went back to it. Maybe there should have been another kind of House, also, but Earth was having another of its periodic moral spasms, and the old women of the male sex who comprised the Company’s Board of Directors threw up their hands in hypocritical horror at the idea of sex where there was no profit to be made from the sale of diapers and cribs and pap.

  Now it was all changing. Libo City was mushrooming. The Company had made it into a shipping terminal to serve the network of planets still out beyond as the Company extended its areas of exploitation. More barracks and more executive cottages were going up as f
ast as goonie labor could build them. Hundreds of tenderfoot Earthers were being shipped in to handle the clerical work of the terminal. Hundreds of Earthers, all at once, to bring with them their tensions, their callousness, swaggering, boasting, cruelties and sadisms which were natural products of life on Earth— and all out of place here where we’d been able to assimilate a couple or so at a time, when there hadn’t been enough to clique up among themselves; they’d had to learn a life of calmness and reason if they wanted to stay.

  Perhaps Miriam Wellman was a necessity. The dear, fresh boys filled the meeting hall, overflowed it, moved the nightly meetings to the open ground of the landing field. She used every emotional trick of the rabble-rouser to whip them up into frenzies, made them drunk on emotion, created a scene of back-pounding, shouting, jittering maniacs. It was a good lesson for anybody who might believe in the progress of the human race toward reason, intelligence.

  I had my doubts about the value of what she was doing, but for what it was, she was good. She knew her business.

  * * * *

  Paul Tyler put the next part of the pattern into motion. I hadn’t seen him since our talk about the first hunting party, but when we settled down in our living-room chairs with our pipes and our tall cool glasses, it was apparent he’d been doing some thinking. He started off obliquely.

  “About three years ago,” he said, as he set his glass back down on the table, “just before I came out here from Earth, I read a book by an Australian hunter of kangaroos.”

  The tone of his voice made it more than idle comment. I waited.

  “This fellow told the reader, every page or so, how stupid the kangaroo is. But everything he said showed how intelligent it is, how perfectly it adapts to its natural environment, takes every advantage. Even a kind of rough tribal organization in the herds, a recognized tribal ownership of lands, battles between tribes or individuals that try to poach, an organized initiation of a stray before it can be adopted into a tribe.”

  “Then how did he justify calling it stupid?” I asked.

  “Maybe the real question is ‘Why?’ “

  “You answer it,” I said.

  “The economy of Australia is based on sheep,” he said. “And sheep, unaided, can’t compete with kangaroos. The kangaroo’s teeth are wedge-shaped to bite clumps, and they can grow fat on new growth while sheep are still down into the heart of grass unable to get anything to eat. The kangaroo’s jump takes him from clump to sparse clump where the sheep will walk himself to death trying to stave off starvation. So the kangaroo has to go, because it interferes with man’s desires.”

  “Does that answer ‘Why?’ “ I asked.

  “Doesn’t it?” he countered. “They have to keep it killed off, if man is to prosper. So they have to deprecate it, to keep their conscience clear. If we granted the goonie equal intelligence with man, could we use it for food? Enslave it for labor?”

  I was quick with a denial.

  “The goonie was tested for intelligence,” I said sharply. “Only a few months after the colony was founded. The Department of Extraterrestrial Psychology sent out a team of testers. Their work was exhaustive, and their findings unequivocal.”

  “This was before you trained goonies for work?” he asked.

  “Well, yes,” I conceded. “But as I understood it, their findings ran deeper than just breaking an animal to do some work patterns. It had to do with super-ego, conscience. You know, we’ve never seen any evidence of tribal organization, any of the customs of the primitive man, no sense of awe, fear, worship. Even their mating seems to be casual, without sense of pairing, permanence. Hardly even herd instinct, except that they grouped where pal trees clustered. But on their own, undirected, nobody ever saw them plant the pal tree. The psychologists were thorough. They just didn’t find evidence to justify calling the goonie intelligent.”

  “That was twenty years ago,” he said. “Now they understand our language, complicated instruction. You’ve taught them to speak, read, and write.”

  I raised my brows. I didn’t think anyone knew about that except Ruth, my wife.

  “Ruth let the cat out of the bag,” he said with a smile. “But I already knew about the speaking. As you say, the goonie has no fear, no conscience, no sense of concealment. They speak around anybody. You can’t keep it concealed, Jim.”

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  “Which brings me to the point. Have you gone a step farther? Have you trained any to do clerical work?”

  “Matter of fact,” I admitted, “I have. The Company has sharp pencils. If I didn’t keep up my records, they’d take the fillings out of my teeth before I knew what was happening. I didn’t have humans, so I trained goonies to do the job. Under detailed instruction, of course,” I added.

  “I need such a clerk, myself,” he said. “There’s a new office manager, fellow by the name of Carl Hest. A—well, maybe you know the kind. He’s taken a particular dislike to me for some reason—well, all right, I know the reason. I caught him abusing his rickshaw goonie, and told him off before I knew who he was. Now he’s getting back at me through my reports. I spend more time making corrected reports, trying to please him, than I do in mining libolines. It’s rough. I’ve got to do something, or he’ll accumulate enough evidence to get me shipped back to Earth. My reports didn’t matter before, so long as I brought in my quota of libolines—the clerks in Libo City fixed up my reports for me. But now I’ve got to do both, with every T crossed and I dotted. It’s driving me nuts.”

  “I had a super like that when I was a Company man,” I said, with sympathy. “It’s part of the nature of the breed.”

  “You train goonies and sell them for all other kinds of work,” he said, at last. “I couldn’t afford to buy an animal trained that far, but could you rent me one? At least while I get over this hump?”

  I was reluctant, but then, why not? As Paul said, I trained goonies for all other kinds of work, why not make a profit on my clerks? What was the difference? And, it wouldn’t be too hard to replace a clerk. They may have no intelligence, as the psychologists defined it, but they learned fast, needed to be shown only once.

  “About those kangaroos,” I said curiously. “How did that author justify calling them stupid?”

  Paul looked at me with a little frown.

  “Oh,” he said, “various ways. For example, a rancher puts up a fence, and a chased kangaroo will beat himself to death trying to jump over it or go through it. Doesn’t seem to get the idea of going around it. Things like that.”

  “Does seem pretty stupid,” I commented.

  “An artificial, man-made barrier,” he said. “Not a part of its natural environment, so it can’t cope with it.”

  “Isn’t that the essence of intelligence?” I asked. “To analyze new situations, and master them?”

  “Looking at it from man’s definition of intelligence, I guess,” he admitted.

  “What other definition do we have?” I asked....

  I went back to the rental of the goonie, then, and we came to a mutually satisfactory figure. I was still a little reluctant, but I couldn’t have explained why. There was something about the speaking, reading, writing, clerical work—I was reluctant to let it get out of my own hands, but reason kept asking me why. Pulling a rickshaw, or cooking, or serving the table, or building a house, or writing figures into a ledger and adding them up—what difference?

  In the days that followed, I couldn’t seem to get Paul’s conversation out of my mind. It wasn’t only that I’d rented him a clerk against my feelings of reluctance. It was something he’d said, something about the kangaroos. I went back over the conversation, reconstructed it sentence by sentence, until I pinned it down.

  “Looking at it from man’s definition of intelligence,” he had said.

  “What other definition do we have?” I had asked.

  What about the goonie’s definition? That was a silly question. As far as I knew, goonies never defined anything. They se
emed to live only for the moment. Perhaps the unfailing supply of fruit from their pal tree, the lack of any natural enemy, had never taught them a sense of want, or fear. And therefore, of conscience? There was no violence in their nature, no resistance to anything. How, then, could man ever hope to understand the goonie? All right, perhaps a resemblance in physical shape, but a mental life so totally alien ...

  Part of the answer came to me then.

  Animal psychology tests, I reasoned, to some degree must be based on how man, himself, would react in a given situation. The animal’s intelligence is measured largely in terms of how close it comes to the behavior of man. A man would discover, after a few tries, that he must go around the fence; but the kangaroo couldn’t figure that out—it was too far removed from anything in a past experience which included no fences, no barriers.

  Alien beings are not man, and do not, cannot, react in the same way as man. Man’s tests, therefore, based solely on his own standards, will never prove any other intelligence in the universe equal to man’s own!

  The tests were as rigged as a crooked slot machine.

  But the goonie did learn to go around the fence. On his own? No, I couldn’t say that. He had the capacity for doing what was shown him, and repeating it when told. But he never did anything on his own, never initiated anything, never created anything. He followed complicated instructions by rote, but only by rote. Never as if he understood the meanings, the abstract meanings. He made sense when he did speak, did not just jabber like a parrot, but he spoke only in direct monosyllables—the words, themselves, a part of the mechanical pattern. I gave it up. Perhaps the psychologists were right, after all.

  A couple of weeks went by before the next part of the pattern fell into place. Paul brought back the goonie clerk.

  “What happened?” I asked, when we were settled in the living room with drinks and pipes. “Couldn’t he do the work?”